Consecutive Colouring of Oriented Graphs

Abstract

We consider arc colourings of oriented graphs such that for each vertex the colours of all out-arcs incident with the vertex and the colours of all in-arcs incident with the vertex form intervals. We prove that the existence of such a colouring is an NP-complete problem. We give the solution of the problem for r-regular oriented graphs, transitive tournaments, oriented graphs with small maximum degree, oriented graphs with small order and some other classes of oriented graphs. We state the conjecture that for each graph there exists a consecutive colourable orientation and confirm the conjecture for complete graphs, 2-degenerate graphs, planar graphs with girth at least 8, and bipartite graphs with arboricity at most two that include all planar bipartite graphs. Additionally, we prove that the conjecture is true for all perfect consecutively colourable graphs and for all forbidden graphs for the class of perfect consecutively colourable graphs.