Routing Symmetric Demands in Directed Minor-Free Graphs with Constant Congestion

The problem of routing in graphs using node-disjoint paths has received a lot of attention and a polylogarithmic approximation algorithm with constant congestion is known for undirected graphs [Chuzhoy and Li 2016] and [Chekuri and Ene 2013]. However, the problem is hard to approximate within polynomial factors on directed graphs, for any constant congestion [Chuzhoy, Kim and Li 2016]. Recently, [Chekuri, Ene and Pilipczuk 2016] have obtained a polylogarithmic approximation with constant congestion on directed planar graphs, for the special case of symmetric demands. We extend their result by obtaining a polylogarithmic approximation with constant congestion on arbitrary directed minor-free graphs, for the case of symmetric demands

Graph Searching Games and Width Measures for Directed Graphs

In cops and robber games a number of cops tries to capture a robber in a graph. A variant of these games on undirected graphs characterises tree width by the least number of cops needed to win. We consider cops and robber games on digraphs and width measures (such as DAG-width, directed tree width or D-width) corresponding to them. All of them generalise tree width and the game characterising it. For the DAG-width game we prove that the problem to decide the minimal number of cops required to capture the robber (which is the same as deciding DAG-width), is PSPACE-complete, in contrast to most other similar games. We also show that the cop-monotonicity cost for directed tree width games cannot be bounded by any function. As a consequence, D-width is not bounded in directed tree width, refuting a conjecture by Safari. A large number of directed width measures generalising tree width has been proposed in the literature. However, only very little was known about the relation between them, in particular about whether classes of digraphs of bounded width in one measure have bounded width in another. In this paper we establish an almost complete order among the most prominent width measures with respect to mutual boundedness

Half-Integral Linkages in Highly Connected Directed Graphs

We study the half-integral k-Directed Disjoint Paths Problem (1/2 kDDPP) in highly strongly connected digraphs. The integral kDDPP is NP-complete even when restricted to instances where k=2, and the input graph is L-strongly connected, for any L >= 1. We show that when the integrality condition is relaxed to allow each vertex to be used in two paths, the problem becomes efficiently solvable in highly connected digraphs (even with k as part of the input). Specifically, we show that there is an absolute constant c such that for each k >= 2 there exists L(k) such that 1/2 kDDPP is solvable in time O(|V(G)|^c) for a L(k)-strongly connected directed graph G. As the function L(k) grows rather quickly, we also show that 1/2 kDDPP is solvable in time O(|V(G)|^{f(k)}) in (36k^3+2k)-strongly connected directed graphs. We show that for each epsilon<1, deciding half-integral feasibility of kDDPP instances is NP-complete when k is given as part of the input, even when restricted to graphs with strong connectivity epsilon k

Constant Congestion Routing of Symmetric Demands in Planar Directed Graphs

We study the problem of routing symmetric demand pairs in planar digraphs. The input consists of a directed planar graph G = (V, E) and a collection of k source-destination pairs M = {s_1t_1, ..., s_kt_k}. The goal is to maximize the number of pairs that are routed along disjoint paths. A pair s_it_i is routed in the symmetric setting if there is a directed path connecting s_i to t_i and a directed path connecting t_i to s_i. In this paper we obtain a randomized poly-logarithmic approximation with constant congestion for this problem in planar digraphs. The main technical contribution is to show that a planar digraph with directed treewidth h contains a constant congestion crossbar of size Omega(h/polylog(h))