Rainbow vertex connection of digraphs

Abstract

An edge-coloured path is rainbow if its edges have distinct colours. An edge-coloured connected graph is said to be rainbow connected if any two vertices are connected by a rainbow path, and strongly rainbow connected if any two vertices are connected by a rainbow geodesic. The (strong) rainbow connection number of a connected graph is the minimum number of colours needed to make the graph (strongly) rainbow connected. These two graph parameters were introduced by Chartrand et al. (Math Bohem 133:85–98, 2008). As an extension, Krivelevich and Yuster proposed the concept of rainbow vertex-connection. The topic of rainbow connection in graphs drew much attention and various similar parameters were introduced, mostly dealing with undirected graphs. Dorbec, Schiermeyer, Sidorowicz and Sopena extended the concept of the rainbow connection to digraphs. In this paper, we consider the (strong) rainbow vertex-connection number of digraphs. Results on the (strong) rainbow vertex-connection number of biorientations of graphs, cycle digraphs, circulant digraphs and tournaments are presented.