On friendship and cyclic parking functions

TL;DR

This paper introduces and analyzes 'friendship parking functions', a new variant of classical parking functions where cars can only park next to friends, characterizes their structure, and explores special cases like cyclic parking functions.

Contribution

It defines friendship parking functions, characterizes and enumerates them, especially for cycle graphs, and establishes a bijection with permutation components for cyclic parking functions.

Findings

Characterization and enumeration of friendship parking functions.

Analysis of friendship parking functions on cycle graphs.

Enumeration and bijection results for cyclic parking functions.

Abstract

In parking problems, a given number of cars enter a one-way street sequentially, and try to park according to a specified preferred spot in the street. Various models are possible depending on the chosen rule for collisions, when two cars have the same preferred spot. In classical parking functions, if a car's preferred spot is already occupied by a previous car, it drives forward and looks for the first unoccupied spot to park. In this work, we introduce a variant of classical parking functions, called "friendship parking functions", which imposes additional restrictions on where cars can park. Namely, a car can only end up parking next to cars which are its friends (friendship will correspond to adjacency in an underlying graph). We characterise and enumerate such friendship parking functions according to their outcome permutation, which describes the final configuration when all cars have parked. We apply this to the case where the underlying friendship graph is the cycle graph. Finally, we consider a subset of classical parking functions, called "cyclic parking functions", where cars end up in an increasing cyclic order. We enumerate these cyclic parking functions and exhibit a bijection to permutation components.