A long-standing conjecture of Kelly states that every regular tournament on n
vertices can be decomposed into (n-1)/2 edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. We prove
this conjecture for large n. In fact, we prove a far more general result, based
on our recent concept of robust expansion and a new method for decomposing
graphs. We show that every sufficiently large regular digraph G on n vertices
whose degree is linear in n and which is a robust outexpander has a
decomposition into edge-disjoint Hamilton cycles. This enables us to obtain
numerous further results, e.g. as a special case we confirm a conjecture of
Erdos on packing Hamilton cycles in random tournaments. As corollaries to the
main result, we also obtain several results on packing Hamilton cycles in
undirected graphs, giving e.g. the best known result on a conjecture of
Nash-Williams. We also apply our result to solve a problem on the domination
ratio of the Asymmetric Travelling Salesman problem, which was raised e.g. by
Glover and Punnen as well as Alon, Gutin and Krivelevich.Comment: new version includes a standalone version of the `robust
decomposition lemma' for application in subsequent paper