Universal obstructions for embedding extension problems

Let K be an induced non-separating subgraph of a graph G, andletB be the bridge of K in G. Obstructions for extending a given 2-cell embedding of K to an embedding of G in the same surface are considered. It is shown that it is possible to find a nice obstruction which means that it has bounded branch size up to a bounded number of “almost disjoint ” millipedes. Moreover, B contains a nice subgraph ˜ B with the following properties. If K is 2-cell embedded in some surface and F is a face of K, then ˜ B admits exactly the same types of embeddings in F as B. A linear time algorithm to construct such a universal obstruction ˜ B is presented. At the same time, for every type of embeddings of ˜ B, an embedding of B ofthesametypeis determined