On BMRN*-colouring of planar digraphs

International audience In a recent work, Bensmail, Blanc, Cohen, Havet and Rocha, motivated by applications for TDMA scheduling problems, have introduced the notion of BMRN*-colouring of digraphs, which is a type of arc-colouring with particular colouring constraints. In particular, they gave a special focus to planar digraphs. They notably proved that every planar digraph can be 8-BMRN*-coloured, while there exist planar digraphs for which 7 colours are needed in a BMRN*-colouring. They also proved that the problem of deciding whether a planar digraph can be 3-BMRN*-coloured is NP-hard. In this work, we pursue these investigations on planar digraphs, in particular by answering some of the questions left open by the authors in that seminal work. We exhibit planar digraphs needing 8 colours to be BMRN*-coloured, thus showing that the upper bound of Bensmail, Blanc, Cohen, Havet and Rocha cannot be decreased in general. We also generalize their complexity result by showing that the problem of deciding whether a planar digraph can be k-BMRN*-coloured is NP-hard for every k ∈ {3,...,6}. Finally, we investigate the connection between the girth of a planar digraphs and the least number of colours in its BMRN*-colourings.

Acyclic Subgraphs of Planar Digraphs

An acyclic set in a digraph is a set of vertices that induces an acyclic subgraph. In 2011, Harutyunyan conjectured that every planar digraph on $n$ vertices without directed 2-cycles possesses an acyclic set of size at least $3n/5$. We prove this conjecture for digraphs where every directed cycle has length at least 8. More generally, if $g$ is the length of the shortest directed cycle, we show that there exists an acyclic set of size at least $(1 - 3/g)n$.

A Note on Obstructions to Clustered Planarity

A planar digraph $D$ is clustered planar if in some planar embedding of $D$ we have at each vertex the in-arcs occurring sequentially in the local rotation. By supplementing the operations used to form the usual minors in Kuratowski's theorem, clustered planar digraphs are characterised.

Shortcutting Planar Digraphs

This paper presents a constructive proof that for any planar digraph G on p vertices, there exists a subset S of the transitive closure of G such that the number of arcs in S is less than or equal to the number of arcs in G, and such that the diameter of G∪S is O(α(p, p)(log p)2). Here the diameter refers to the maximum distance from a vertex υ to a vertex w where (υ, w) is from the transitive closure of G – which is also the transitive closure of G ∪ S. This result provides support for the author's previous conjecture that such a set S achieving a diameter polylogarithmic in the number of vertices exists for any digraph. The result also adresses an open question of Chazelle, who did some related work on trees, and suggested the generalization to the planar cases.