Clearing directed subgraphs by mobile agents: Variations on covering with paths

Abstract

We study several problems of clearing subgraphs by mobile agents in digraphs. The agents can move only along directed walks of a digraph and, depending on the variant, their initial positions may be pre-specified. In general, for a given subset S of vertices of a digraph D and a positive integer k, the objective is to determine whether there is a subgraph H=(VH,AH) of D such that (a) S⊆VH, (b) H is the union of k directed walks in D, and (c) the underlying graph of H includes a Steiner tree for S in D. Since a directed walk is a not necessarily a simple directed path, the problem is actually on covering with paths. We provide several results on the polynomial time tractability, hardness, and parameterized complexity of the problem. Our main fixed-parameter algorithm is randomized.