On-line maintenance of triconnected components with SPQR-trees

We consider the problem of maintaining on-line the triconnected components of a graphG. Letn be the current number of vertices ofG. We present anO(n)-space data structure that supports insertions of vertices and edges, and queries of the type “Are there three vertex-disjoint paths between verticesv ₁ andv ₂?” A sequence ofk operations takes timeO(k·α(k, n)) ifG is biconnected(α(k, n) denotes the well-known Ackermann's function inverse), and timeO(n logn+k) ifG is not biconnected. Note that the bounds do not depend on the number of edges ofG. We use theSPQR-tree, a versatile data structure that represents the decomposition of a biconnected graph with respect to its triconnected components, and theBC-tree, which represents the decomposition of a connected graph with respect to its biconnected components.