Characterizations and Directed Path-Width of Sequence Digraphs

Computing the directed path-width of a directed graph is an NP-hard problem. Even for digraphs of maximum semi-degree 3 the problem remains hard. We propose a decomposition of an input digraph G=(V,A) by a number k of sequences with entries from V, such that (u,v) in A if and only if in one of the sequences there is an occurrence of u appearing before an occurrence of v. We present several graph theoretical properties of these digraphs. Among these we give forbidden subdigraphs of digraphs which can be defined by k=1 sequence, which is a subclass of semicomplete digraphs. Given the decomposition of digraph G, we show an algorithm which computes the directed path-width of G in time O(k\cdot (1+N)^k), where N denotes the maximum sequence length. This leads to an XP-algorithm w.r.t. k for the directed path-width problem. Our result improves the algorithms of Kitsunai et al. for digraphs of large directed path-width which can be decomposed by a small number of sequence.