Extremal and degree donditions for path extendability in digraphs

In the study of cycles and paths, the meta-conjecture of Bondy that sufficient conditions for Hamiltonicity often imply pancyclicity has motivated research on the existence of cycles and paths of many lengths. Hendry further introduced the stronger concepts of cycle extendability and path extendability, which require that every cycle or path can be extended to another one with one additional vertex. These concepts have been studied extensively, but there exist few results on path extendability in digraphs, as far as we know. In this paper, we make the first attempt in this direction. We establish a number of extremal and degree conditions for path extendability in general digraphs. Moreover, we prove that every path of length at least two in a regular tournament is extendable, with some exceptions. One of our proof approaches is a new contraction operation to transform nonextendable paths into nonextendable cycles

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

On Maltsev Digraphs

This is an Open Access article, first published by E-CJ on 25 February 2015.We study digraphs preserved by a Maltsev operation: Maltsev digraphs. We show that these digraphs retract either onto a directed path or to the disjoint union of directed cycles, showing in this way that the constraint satisfaction problem for Maltsev digraphs is in logspace, L. We then generalize results from Kazda (2011) to show that a Maltsev digraph is preserved not only by a majority operation, but by a class of other operations (e.g., minority, Pixley) and obtain a O(|VG|4)-time algorithm to recognize Maltsev digraphs. We also prove analogous results for digraphs preserved by conservative Maltsev operations which we use to establish that the list homomorphism problem for Maltsev digraphs is in L. We then give a polynomial time characterisation of Maltsev digraphs admitting a conservative 2-semilattice operation. Finally, we give a simple inductive construction of directed acyclic digraphs preserved by a Maltsev operation, and relate them with series parallel digraphs.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Switching Reconstruction of Digraphs

Switching about a vertex in a digraph means to reverse the direction of every edge incident with that vertex. Bondy and Mercier introduced the problem of whether a digraph can be reconstructed up to isomorphism from the multiset of isomorphism types of digraphs obtained by switching about each vertex. Since the largest known non-reconstructible oriented graphs have 8 vertices, it is natural to ask whether there are any larger non-reconstructible graphs. In this paper we continue the investigation of this question. We find that there are exactly 44 non-reconstructible oriented graphs whose underlying undirected graphs have maximum degree at most 2. We also determine the full set of switching-stable oriented graphs, which are those graphs for which all switchings return a digraph isomorphic to the original