Swapping Mixed-Up Beers to Keep Them Cool

There was a mix-up in Escher’s bar and n customers sitting at the same table have each received a beer ordered by somebody else in the party. The drinks can be rearranged by swapping them in pairs, but the eccentric table shape only allows drinks to be exchanged between people sitting on opposite sides of the table. We study the problem of finding the minimum number of swaps needed so that each customer receives its desired beer before it gets warm. Formally, we consider the Colored Token Swapping problem on complete bipartite graphs. This problem is known to be solvable in polynomial time when all ordered drinks are different [Yamanaka et al., FUN 2014], but no results are known for the more general case in which multiple people in the party can order the same beer. We prove that Colored Token Swapping on complete bipartite graphs is NP-hard and that it is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the number of distinct types of beer served by the bar.