English

Finding subdigraphs in digraphs of bounded directed treewidth

Data Structures and Algorithms 2025-08-20 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

It is well known that directed treewidth does not enjoy the nice algorithmic properties of its undirected counterpart. There exist, however, some positive results that, essentially, present XP algorithms for the problem of finding, in a given digraph DD, a subdigraph isomorphic to a digraph HH that can be formed by the union of kk directed paths (with some extra properties), parameterized by kk and the directed treewidth of DD. Our motivation is to tackle the following question: Are there subdigraphs, other than the directed paths, that can be found efficiently in digraphs of bounded directed treewidth? In a nutshell, the main message of this article is that, other than the directed paths, the only digraphs that seem to behave well with respect to directed treewidth are the stars. For this, we present a number of positive and negative results, generalizing several results in the literature, as well as some directions for further research.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.13830,
  title  = {Finding subdigraphs in digraphs of bounded directed treewidth},
  author = {Raul Lopes and Ignasi Sau},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.13830},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:56:47.903Z