English

On finite reflexive homomorphism-homogeneous binary relational systems

Combinatorics 2009-12-31 v1

Abstract

A structure is called homogeneous if every isomorphism between finitely induced substructures of the structure extends to an automorphism of the structure. Recently, P. J. Cameron and J. Ne\v{s}et\v{r}il introduced a relaxed version of homogeneity: we say that a structure is homomorphism-homogeneous if every homomorphism between finitely induced substructures of the structure extends to an endomorphism of the structure. In this paper we consider finite homomorphism-homogeneous relational systems with one reflexive binary relation. We show that for a large part of such relational systems (bidirectionally connected digraphs; a digraph is bidirectionally connected if each of its connected components can be traversed by \rightleftarrows-paths) the problem of deciding whether the system is homomorphism-homogeneous is coNP-complete. Consequently, for this class of relational systems we cannot hope for a description involving a catalogue, where by a catalogue we understand a finite list of polynomially decidable classes of structures. On the other hand, in case of bidirectionally disconnected digraphs we present the full characterization. Our main result states that if a digraph is bidirectionally disconnected, then it is homomorphism-homogeneous if and only if it is either a finite homomorphism-homogeneous quasiorder, or an inflation of a homomorphism-homogeneous digraph with involution (a peculiar class of digraphs introduced later in the paper), or an inflation of a digraph whose only connected components are C3C_3^\circ and \1\1^\circ.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0912.4978,
  title  = {On finite reflexive homomorphism-homogeneous binary relational systems},
  author = {Dragan Mašulović and Rajko Nenadov and Nemanja Škorić},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0912.4978},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

Submited to Discrete Mathematics

R2 v1 2026-06-21T14:28:25.910Z