Motivated by an application in network security, we investigate the following "linear" case of Directed Mutlicut. Let G be a directed graph which includes some distinguished vertices t1,…,tk. What is the size of the smallest edge cut which eliminates all paths from ti to tj for all i<j? We show that this problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parametrized in the cutset size p via an algorithm running in O(4ppn4) time.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1407.7498,
title = {Directed Multicut with linearly ordered terminals},
author = {Robert F. Erbacher and Trent Jaeger and Nirupama Talele and Jason Teutsch},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.7498},
year = {2014}
}