Acyclic coloring of special digraphs

Abstract

An acyclic r-coloring of a directed graph G = (V, E) is a partition of the vertex set V into r acyclic sets. The dichromatic number of a directed graph G is the smallest r such that G allows an acyclic r-coloring. For symmetric digraphs the dichromatic number equals the well-known chromatic number of the underlying undirected graph. This allows us to carry over the W[1]-hardness and lower bounds for running times of the chromatic number problem parameterized by clique-width to the dichromatic number problem parameterized by directed clique-width. We introduce the first polynomial-time algorithm for the acyclic coloring problem on digraphs of constant directed clique-width. From a parameterized point of view our algorithm shows that the Dichromatic Number problem is in XP when parameterized by directed clique-width and extends the only known structural parameterization by directed modular width for this problem. For directed co-graphs, which is a class of digraphs of directed clique-width 2, and several generalizations we even show linear time solutions for computing the dichromatic number. Furthermore, we conclude that directed co-graphs and the considered generalizations lead to subclasses of perfect digraphs. For directed cactus forests, which is a set of digraphs of directed tree-width 1, we conclude an upper bound of 2 for the dichromatic number and we show that an optimal acyclic coloring can be computed in linear time.