Chen and Chv\'atal's Conjecture in tournaments

TL;DR

This paper extends Chen and Chvátal's conjecture to directed graphs, proving it holds for all tournaments and certain bipartite graph orientations, by analyzing the structure of shortest directed paths and lines.

Contribution

It introduces a directed graph version of Chen and Chvátal's conjecture and proves it for all tournaments and specific bipartite orientations, expanding the conjecture's applicability.

Findings

The conjecture holds for all tournaments.

The conjecture holds for orientations of complete bipartite graphs with diameter three.

A new framework for lines in directed graphs is proposed.

Abstract

In this work we present a version of the so called Chen and Chv\'atal's conjecture for directed graphs. A line of a directed graph D is defined by an ordered pair (u, v), with u and v two distinct vertices of D, as the set of all vertices w such that u, v, w belong to a shortest directed path in D containing a shortest directed path from u to v. A line is empty if there is no directed path from u to v. Another option is that a line is the set of all vertices. The version of the Chen and Chv\'atal's conjecture we study states that if none of previous options hold, then the number of distinct lines in D is at least its number of vertices. Our main result is that any tournament satisfies this conjecture as well as any orientation of a complete bipartite graph of diameter three.