Parking functions on directed stars and orientation reversal with an extension to general directed trees

TL;DR

This paper investigates how reversing edge orientations in directed stars and trees affects the number of parking functions, revealing that orientation reversal generally increases parking functions especially in large trees.

Contribution

It demonstrates that reversing orientations increases parking functions on directed stars and extends this result to general directed trees with many vertices.

Findings

Orientation reversal increases parking functions on directed stars.

Reversal also increases parking functions on large directed trees.

Results provide new insights into parking function enumeration on directed graphs.

Abstract

Parking functions, classically defined in terms of cars with preferred parking spots on a directed path attempting to park there, arise in many combinatorial situations and have seen various generalizations. In particular, parking functions have been defined for general digraphs, which yields many more enumeration problems. For example, in a directed tree whose edges are orientated away from the root, it is unknown in general how the number of parking functions on it changes once the orientation is reversed, even in the case when the tree is a star. We show that this orientation reversal results in more parking functions on the directed star in most cases, after which we extend these methods to show that this also results in more parking functions on the general directed tree if, in some sense, the number of vertices greatly exceeds the number of cars.