The burning number of directed graphs

Bounds and computational complexity

Journal Article (2020)
Author(s)

Remie Janssen (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Research Group
Discrete Mathematics and Optimization
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.20429/TAG.2020.070108 Final published version
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Publication Year
2020
Language
English
Research Group
Discrete Mathematics and Optimization
Issue number
1
Volume number
7
Article number
8
Downloads counter
237
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Abstract

The burning number of a graph was recently introduced by Bonato et al. Although they mention that the burning number generalises naturally to directed graphs, no further research on this has been done. Here, we introduce graph burning for directed graphs, and we study bounds for the corresponding burning number and the hardness of finding this number. We derive sharp bounds from simple algorithms and examples. The hardness question yields more surprising results: finding the burning number of a directed tree with one indegree-0 node is NP-hard, but FPT; however, it is W[2]complete for DAGs. Finally, we give a fixed-parameter algorithm to find the burning number of a digraph, with a parameter inspired by research in phylogenetic networks.