Interval graphs, adjusted interval digraphs, and reflexive list homomorphisms

Interval graphs admit linear-time recognition algorithms and have several elegant forbidden structure characterizations. Interval digraphs can also be recognized in polynomial time, and they admit a characterization in terms of incidence matrices. Nevertheless, they do not have a known forbidden structure characterization or low-degree polynomial-time recognition algorithm. We introduce a new class of 'adjusted interval digraphs'. By contrast, for these digraphs we exhibit a natural forbidden structure characterization, in terms of a novel structure which we call an 'invertible pair'. Our characterization also yields a low-degree polynomial-time recognition algorithm of adjusted interval digraphs. It turns out that invertible pairs are also useful for undirected interval graphs, and our result yields a new forbidden structure characterization of interval graphs. In fact, it can be shown to be a natural link proving the equivalence of some known characterizations of interval graphs-the theorems of Lekkerkerker and Boland, and of Fulkerson and Gross. In addition, adjusted interval digraphs naturally arise in the context of list homomorphism problems. If H is a reflexive undirected graph, the list homomorphism problem LHOM(H) is polynomial if H is an interval graph, and NP-complete otherwise. If H is a reflexive digraph, LHOM(H) is polynomial if H is an adjusted interval graph, and we conjecture that it is also NP-complete otherwise. We show that our results imply the conjecture in two important cases.