Dijoin

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In mathematics, a dijoin is a subset of the edges of a directed graph, with the property that contracting every edge in the dijoin produces a strongly connected graph. Equivalently, a dijoin is a subset of the edges that, for every dicut, includes at least one edge crossing the dicut. Here, a dicut is a partition of the vertices into two subsets, so that each edge that has an endpoint in both subsets is directed from the first subset to the second.

File:Dijoin.png
When either the red set of edges or the green edge is contracted, the resulting graph is strongly connected. This means that each of these is a dijoin.

Woodall's conjecture, an unsolved problem in this area, states that in any directed graph the minimum number of edges in a dicut (the unweighted minimum closure) equals the maximum number of disjoint dijoins that can be found in the graph (a packing of dijoins).[1][2] A fractional weighted version of the conjecture, posed by Jack Edmonds and Rick Giles, was refuted by Alexander Schrijver.[3][4][1]

The Lucchesi–Younger theorem states that the minimum size of a dijoin, in any given directed graph, equals the maximum number of disjoint dicuts that can be found in the graph.[5][6] The minimum weight dijoin in a weighted graph can be found in polynomial time,[7] and is a special case of the submodular flow problem.[8]

In planar graphs, dijoins and feedback arc sets are dual concepts. The dual graph of a directed graph, embedded in the plane, is a graph with a vertex for each face of the given graph, and a dual edge between two dual vertices when the corresponding two faces are separated by an edge. Each dual edge crosses one of the original graph edges, turned by 90° clockwise. A feedback arc set is a subset of the edges that includes at least one edge from every directed cycle. For a dijoin in the given graph, the corresponding set of edges forms a directed cut in the dual graph, and vice versa.[9] This relationship between these two problems allows the feedback arc set problem to be solved efficiently for planar graphs, even though it is NP-hard for other types of graphs.[7]

References

  1. 1.0 1.1 Abdi, Ahmad (2022), On packing dijoins in digraphs and weighted digraphs 
  2. Woodall, D. R. (1978), "Menger and König systems", in Alavi, Yousef; Lick, Don R., Theory and applications of graphs (Proc. Internat. Conf., Western Mich. Univ., Kalamazoo, Mich., 1976), Lecture Notes in Mathematics, 642, Berlin: Springer, pp. 620–635, doi:10.1007/BFb0070416 
  3. "A min-max relation for submodular functions on graphs", Studies in integer programming (Proc. Workshop, Bonn, 1975), Annals of Discrete Mathematics, 1, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1977, pp. 185–204 
  4. "A counterexample to a conjecture of Edmonds and Giles", Discrete Mathematics 32 (2): 213–215, 1980, doi:10.1016/0012-365X(80)90057-6, https://ir.cwi.nl/pub/9906/9906D.pdf 
  5. "On two minimax theorems in graph", Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B 21 (2): 96–103, 1976, doi:10.1016/0095-8956(76)90049-6 
  6. Lucchesi, C. L.; Younger, D. H. (1978), "A minimax theorem for directed graphs", Journal of the London Mathematical Society, Second Series 17 (3): 369–374, doi:10.1112/jlms/s2-17.3.369 
  7. 7.0 7.1 "How to make a digraph strongly connected", Combinatorica 1 (2): 145–153, 1981, doi:10.1007/BF02579270 
  8. "A framework for cost-scaling algorithms for submodular flow problems", Proceedings of the 34th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), Palo Alto, California, USA, 3-5 November 1993, IEEE Computer Society, 1993, pp. 449–458, doi:10.1109/SFCS.1993.366842 
  9. "Centroids, representations, and submodular flows", Journal of Algorithms 18 (3): 586–628, 1995, doi:10.1006/jagm.1995.1022