Efficient computation of the oriented chromatic number of recursively defined digraphs

Abstract

In this paper we consider colorings of oriented graphs, i.e. digraphs without cycles of length 2. Given some oriented graph G=(V,E), an oriented r-coloring for G is a partition of the vertex set V into r independent sets, such that all the arcs between two of these sets have the same direction. The oriented chromatic number of G is the smallest integer r such that G permits an oriented r-coloring. Deciding whether an acyclic digraph has an oriented 4-coloring is NP-hard, which motivates to consider the problem on special graph classes.In this paper we consider the Oriented Chromatic Number problem on classes of recursively defined oriented graphs. Oriented co-graphs (short for oriented complement reducible graphs) can be recursively defined from the single vertex graph by applying the disjoint union and order composition. This recursive structure allows to compute an optimal oriented coloring and the oriented chromatic number in linear time. We generalize this result using the concept of perfect orderable graphs. Therefore, we show that for acyclic transitive digraphs every greedy coloring along a topological ordering leads to an optimal oriented coloring. Msp-digraphs (short for minimal series-parallel digraphs) can be defined from the single vertex graph by applying the parallel composition and series composition. We prove an upper bound of 7 for the oriented chromatic number for msp-digraphs and we give an example to show that this is bound best possible. We apply this bound and the recursive structure of msp-digraphs to obtain a linear time solution for computing the oriented chromatic number of msp-digraphs.In order to generalize the results on computing the oriented chromatic number of special graph classes, we consider the parameterized complexity of the Oriented Chromatic Number problem by so-called structural parameters, which are measuring the difficulty of decomposing a graph into a special tree-structure.