Invertibility of digraphs and tournaments

TL;DR

This paper investigates the inversion number of digraphs and tournaments, providing complexity results, confirming conjectures, and establishing bounds, thereby advancing understanding of digraph invertibility and related computational problems.

Contribution

It proves the fixed-parameter tractability for tournaments, NP-completeness for general graphs, confirms conjectures on inversion number and cycle transversal number, and determines asymptotic bounds for tournaments.

Findings

Deciding if a tournament has inversion number ≤ k is fixed-parameter tractable.

Determining if a general digraph has inversion number ≤ k is NP-complete.

Maximum inversion number of an n-vertex tournament is asymptotically n.

Abstract

For an oriented graph $D$ and a set $X\subseteq V(D)$, the inversion of $X$ in $D$ is the digraph obtained by reversing the orientations of the edges of $D$ with both endpoints in $X$. The inversion number of $D$, $\textrm{inv}(D)$, is the minimum number of inversions which can be applied in turn to $D$ to produce an acyclic digraph. Answering a recent question of Bang-Jensen, da Silva, and Havet we show that, for each $k\in\mathbb{N}$ and tournament $T$, the problem of deciding whether $\textrm{inv}(T)\leq k$ is solvable in time $O_k(|V(T)|^2)$, which is tight for all $k$. In particular, the problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterised by $k$. On the other hand, we build on their work to prove their conjecture that for $k\geq 1$ the problem of deciding whether a general oriented graph $D$ has $\textrm{inv}(D)\leq k$ is NP-complete. We also construct oriented graphs with inversion number equal to twice their cycle transversal number, confirming another conjecture of Bang-Jensen, da Silva, and Havet, and we provide a counterexample to their conjecture concerning the inversion number of so-called 'dijoin' digraphs while proving that it holds in certain cases. Finally, we asymptotically solve the natural extremal question in this setting, improving on previous bounds of Belkhechine, Bouaziz, Boudabbous, and Pouzet to show that the maximum inversion number of an $n$-vertex tournament is $(1+o(1))n$.