Arc-Disjoint Paths and Trees in 2-Regular Digraphs

An out-(in-)branching B_s^+ (B_s^-) rooted at s in a digraph D is a connected spanning subdigraph of D in which every vertex x != s has precisely one arc entering (leaving) it and s has no arcs entering (leaving) it. We settle the complexity of the following two problems: 1) Given a 2-regular digraph $D$, decide if it contains two arc-disjoint branchings B^+_u, B^-_v. 2) Given a 2-regular digraph D, decide if it contains an out-branching B^+_u such that D remains connected after removing the arcs of B^+_u. Both problems are NP-complete for general digraphs. We prove that the first problem remains NP-complete for 2-regular digraphs, whereas the second problem turns out to be polynomial when we do not prescribe the root in advance. We also prove that, for 2-regular digraphs, the latter problem is in fact equivalent to deciding if $D$ contains two arc-disjoint out-branchings. We generalize this result to k-regular digraphs where we want to find a number of pairwise arc-disjoint spanning trees and out-branchings such that there are k in total, again without prescribing any roots.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Arc-disjoint out- and in-branchings in compositions of digraphs

An out-branching $B^+_u$ (in-branching $B^-_u$) in a digraph $D$ is a connected spanning subdigraph of $D$ in which every vertex except the vertex $u$, called the root, has in-degree (out-degree) one. A {\bf good $\mathbf{(u,v)}$-pair} in $D$ is a pair of branchings $B^+_u,B^-_v$ which have no arc in common. Thomassen proved that is NP-complete to decide if a digraph has any good pair. A digraph is {\bf semicomplete} if it has no pair of non adjacent vertices. A {\bf semicomplete composition} is any digraph $D$ which is obtained from a semicomplete digraph $S$ by substituting an arbitrary digraph $H_x$ for each vertex $x$ of $S$. Recently the authors of this paper gave a complete classification of semicomplete digraphs which have a good $(u,v)$-pair, where $u,v$ are prescribed vertices of $D$. They also gave a polynomial algorithm which for a given semicomplete digraph $D$ and vertices $u,v$ of $D$, either produces a good $(u,v)$-pair in $D$ or a certificate that $D$ has such pair. In this paper we show how to use the result for semicomplete digraphs to completely solve the problem of deciding whether a given semicomplete composition $D$, has a good $(u,v)$-pair for given vertices $u,v$ of $D$. Our solution implies that the problem is polynomially solvable for all semicomplete compositions. In particular our result implies that there is a polynomial algorithm for deciding whether a given quasi-transitive digraph $D$ has a good $(u,v)$-pair for given vertices $u,v$ of $D$. This confirms a conjecture of Bang-Jensen and Gutin from 1998

Edge disjoint In- and Out-branchings in Tournaments and related path problems

AbstractWe give good characterizations in Edmonds' sense for the following problems for tournaments. 1.(1) Given a tournament T and v1, v2 ∈ V(T), possibly v1 = v2, when do there exist edge-disjoint branchings Fv1+, Fv2−, such that Fv1+ is an out-branching rooted at v1 and Fv2− is an in-branching rooted at v2?2.(2) Given a strong tournament T and x1, x2, y1, y2 ∈ V(T) all different, when do there exist edge-disjoint (x1, y1)-, (x2, y2)-paths in T?3.(3) Given a strong tournament T and a, b, c ∈ V(T) all different, when do there exist edge-disjoint (a, b)-, (b, c)-paths in T?Problem (2) is known to be NP-complete for digraphs in general and we give a proof by C. Thomassen that problem (1) is NP-complete for digraphs in general