On coloring the arcs of a tournament, covering shortest paths, and reducing the diameter of a graph

We define closed edge colorings of directed graphs, and state a conjecture about the maximum size of a tournament graph that can be arc-colored with m colors and contain no closed subgraphs. We prove special cases of this conjecture. We show that if this conjecture is correct then for any (undirected) graph with positive edge lengths and a given subset V^' of nodes, covering all the shortest paths between pairs of nodes of V^' requires at least |V^'|-1 edges. We use the latter property to produce an approximation algorithm with improved bound for minimizing the diameter or the radius of an unweighted graph by adding to it a given number of new edges.

[1]  A. Frieze,et al.  A simple heuristic for the p-centre problem , 1985 .

[2]  Susanne E. Hambrusch,et al.  Minimizing the Diameter in Tree Networks Under Edge Reductions , 1999, Parallel Process. Lett..

[3]  Ján Plesník,et al.  A heuristic for the p-center problems in graphs , 1987, Discret. Appl. Math..

[4]  Hiroshi Nagamochi,et al.  Augmenting Forests to Meet Odd Diameter Requirements , 2003, ISAAC.

[5]  R. Kevin Wood,et al.  Shortest‐path network interdiction , 2002, Networks.

[6]  Rico Zenklusen,et al.  Matching interdiction , 2008, Discret. Appl. Math..

[7]  Cynthia A. Phillips,et al.  The network inhibition problem , 1993, STOC.

[8]  Enrico Nardelli,et al.  Finding the most vital node of a shortest path , 2003, Theor. Comput. Sci..

[9]  Roberto Solis-Oba,et al.  Increasing the weight of minimum spanning trees , 1996, SODA '96.

[10]  Chung-Lun Li,et al.  On the minimum-cardinality-bounded-diameter and the bounded-cardinality-minimum-diameter edge addition problems , 1992, Oper. Res. Lett..

[11]  R. Ravi,et al.  Improving minimum cost spanning trees by upgrading nodes , 1998 .

[12]  Bhaba R. Sarker,et al.  Discrete location theory , 1991 .

[13]  Éric Sopena,et al.  Oriented graph coloring , 2001, Discret. Math..

[14]  Victor Chepoi,et al.  Upgrading trees under diameter and budget constraints , 2003, Networks.

[15]  David B. Shmoys,et al.  A Best Possible Heuristic for the k-Center Problem , 1985, Math. Oper. Res..

[16]  T. Lowe,et al.  Upgrading arcs to minimize the maximum travel time in a network , 2006 .