Directed branch-width: A directed analogue of tree-width

09/18/2020

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by   Benjamin Merlin Bumpus, et al.

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We introduce a new digraph width measure called directed branch-width. To do this, we generalize a characterization of graph classes of bounded tree-width in terms of their line graphs to digraphs. Under parameterizations by directed branch-width we obtain linear time algorithms for many problems, such as directed Hamilton path and Max-Cut, which are hard when parameterized by other known directed width measures. More generally, we obtain an algorithmic meta-theorem for the model-checking problem for a restricted variant of MSO_2-logic on classes of bounded directed branch-width.