Complexity and approximability of the k-way vertex cut

In this article, we consider k-way vertex cut: the problem of finding a graph separator of a given size that decomposes the graph into the maximum number of components. Our main contribution is the derivation of an efficient polynomial-time approximation scheme for the problem on planar graphs. Also, we show that k-way vertex cut is polynomially solvable on graphs of bounded treewidth and fixed-parameter tractable on planar graphs with the size of the separator as the parameter.