Locating Dominating Sets in local tournaments

TL;DR

This paper extends bounds on the size of locating dominating sets in special classes of directed graphs, including local tournaments and quasi-twin-free digraphs, improving understanding of their structural properties.

Contribution

It generalizes known bounds for tournaments to connected local tournaments and quasi-twin-free digraphs with a supervising vertex.

Findings

Bound of rac{2n}{3} for connected local tournaments.

Bound of rac{2n}{3} for quasi-twin-free digraphs with a supervising vertex.

Improves previous bounds for specific classes of directed graphs.

Abstract

A dominating set in a directed graph is a set of vertices $S$ such that all the vertices that do not belong to $S$ have an in-neighbour in $S$. A locating set $S$ is a set of vertices such that all the vertices that do not belong to $S$ are characterized uniquely by the in-neighbours they have in $S$, i.e. for every two vertices $u$ and $v$ that are not in $S$, there exists a vertex $s\in S$ that dominates exactly one of them. The size of a smallest set of a directed graph $D$ which is both locating and dominating is denoted by $\gamma^{LD}(D)$. Foucaud, Heydarshahi and Parreau proved that any twin-free digraph $D$ satisfies $\gamma^{LD}(D)\leq \frac{4n} 5 +1$ but conjectured that this bound can be lowered to $\frac{2n} 3$. The conjecture is still open. They also proved that if $D$ is a tournament, i.e. a directed graph where there is one arc between every pair of vertices, then $\gamma^{LD}(D)\leq \lceil \frac{n}{2}\rceil$. The main result of this paper is the generalization of this bound to connected local tournaments, i.e. connected digraphs where the in- and out-neighbourhoods of every vertex induce a tournament. We also prove $\gamma^{LD}(D)\leq \frac{2n} 3$ for all quasi-twin-free digraphs $D$ that admit a supervising vertex (a vertex from which any vertex is reachable). This class of digraphs generalizes twin-free acyclic graphs, the most general class for which this bound was known.