Flip graphs are a ubiquitous class of graphs, which encode relations on a set of combinatorial objects by elementary, local changes. Skeletons of associahedra, for instance, are the graphs induced by quadrilateral flips in triangulations of a convex polygon. For some definition of a flip graph, a natural computational problem to consider is the flip distance: Given two objects, what is the minimum number of flips needed to transform one into the other? We consider flip graphs on orientations of simple graphs, where flips consist of reversing the direction of some edges. More precisely, we consider so-called-orientations of a graph G, in which every vertex v has a specified outdegree (v) , and a flip consists of reversing all edges of a directed cycle. We prove that deciding whether the flip distance between two-orientations of a planar graph G is at most two is NP-complete. This also holds in the special case of perfect matchings, where flips involve alternating cycles. This problem amounts to finding geodesics on the common base polytope of two partition matroids, or, alternatively, on an alcoved polytope. It therefore provides an interesting example of a flip distance question that is computationally intractable despite having a natural interpretation as a geodesic on a nicely structured combinatorial polytope. We also consider the dual question of the flip distance between graph orientations in which every cycle has a specified number of forward edges, and a flip is the reversal of all edges in a minimal directed cut. In general, the problem remains hard. However, if we restrict to flips that only change sinks into sources, or vice-versa, then the problem can be solved in polynomial time. Here we exploit the fact that the flip graph is the cover graph of a distributive lattice. This generalizes a recent result from Zhang et al.
We introduce a new notion of circular colourings for digraphs. The idea of this quantity, called star dichromatic number χ * (D) of a digraph D, is to allow a finer subdivision of digraphs with the same dichromatic number into such which are "easier" or "harder" to colour by allowing fractional values. This is related to a coherent notion for the vertex arboricity of graphs introduced in [WZLW11] and resembles the concept of the star chromatic number of graphs introduced by Vince in [Vin88] in the framework of digraph colouring. After presenting basic properties of the new quantity, including range, simple classes of digraphs, general inequalities and its relation to integer counterparts as well as other concepts of fractional colouring, we compare our notion with the notion of circular colourings for digraphs introduced in [BFJ + 04] and point out similarities as well as differences in certain situations. As it turns out, the star dichromatic number shares all positive characteristics with the circular dichromatic number of Bokal et al., but has the advantage that it depends on the strong components of the digraph only, while the addition of a dominating source raises the circular dichromatic number to the ceiling. We conclude with a discussion of the case of planar digraphs and point out some open problems. arXiv:1809.00142v3 [math.CO]
We investigate which planar point sets allow simultaneous straight-line embeddings of all planar graphs on a fixed number of vertices. We first show that at least (1.293 − o(1))n points are required to find a straight-line drawing of each n-vertex planar graph (vertices are drawn as the given points); this improves the previous best constant 1.235 by Kurowski (2004).Our second main result is based on exhaustive computer search: We show that no set of 11 points exists, on which all planar 11-vertex graphs can be simultaneously drawn plane straight-line. This strengthens the result by Cardinal, Hoffmann, and Kusters (2015), that all planar graphs on n ≤ 10 vertices can be simultaneously drawn on particular n-universal sets of n points while there are no n-universal sets of size n for n ≥ 15. We also provide 49 planar 11-vertex graphs which cannot be simultaneously drawn on any set of 11 points. This, in fact, is another step towards a (negative) answer of the question, whether every two planar graphs can be drawn simultaneously -a question raised by Brass, Cenek, Duncan, Efrat, Erten, Ismailescu, Kobourov, Lubiw, and Mitchell (2007).
Many well-known NP-hard algorithmic problems on directed graphs resist efficient parametrisations with most known width measures for directed graphs, such as directed treewidth, DAG-width, Kelly-width and many others. While these focus on measuring how close a digraph is to an oriented tree resp. a directed acyclic graph, in this paper, we investigate directed modular width as a parameter, which is closer to the concept of clique-width. We investigate applications of modular decompositions of directed graphs to a wide range of algorithmic problems and derive FPT-algorithms for several well-known digraph-specific NP-hard problems, namely minimum (weight) directed feedback vertex set, minimum (weight) directed dominating set, digraph colouring, directed Hamiltonian path/cycle, partitioning into paths, (capacitated) vertex-disjoint directed paths, and the directed subgraph homeomorphism problem. The latter yields a polynomial-time algorithm for detecting topological minors in digraphs of bounded directed modular width. Finally we illustrate that also other structural digraph parameters, such as directed pathwidth and the cycle-rank can be computed efficiently using directed modular width as a parameter.
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