A minimum semi-degree condition for unpaired many-to-many disjoint path covers in digraphs

TL;DR

This paper proves a minimum semi-degree condition that guarantees the existence of a special set of disjoint paths covering all vertices in a digraph, connecting specified source and sink sets in a flexible manner.

Contribution

It provides a new proof for a semi-degree condition ensuring unpaired many-to-many path covers in digraphs, and establishes the bound as tight for large graphs.

Findings

Every digraph with semi-degree at least (n+k)/2 has the path cover.

The semi-degree bound is tight for n ≥ 3k.

The result generalizes previous path cover theorems.

Abstract

For a digraph $D$, let $\delta^{0}(D) = \min \{\delta^{+}(D), \delta^{-}(D)\}$ be the minimum semi-degree of $D$. A set of $k$ vertex-disjoint paths, $\{P_{1}, \dots, P_{k}\}$, joining a disjoint source set $S = \{s_{1}, \dots, s_{k}\}$ and sink set $T = \{t_{1}, \dots, t_{k}\}$ is called an unpaired many-to-many $k$-disjoint directed path cover ($k$-DDPC for short) of $D$, if each $P_{j}$ joins $s_{j}$ and $t_{\sigma(j)}$ for some permutation $\sigma$ on $\{1, \dots , k\}$ and $\bigcup^{k}_{j=1} V(P_{j}) = V(D)$. In this paper, we give a new proof for the following result that every digraph $D$ with $\delta^{0}(D) \geq \lceil (n+k) / 2 \rceil$ has an unpaired many-to-many $k$-DDPC joining any disjoint source set $S$ and sink set $T$, where $S = \{s_{1}, \dots, s_{k}\}$ and $T = \{t_{1}, \dots, t_{k}\}$. Moreover, we show that the bound on the minimum semi-degree is best possible when $n \geq 3k$.