English

Well-Quasi-Ordering Eulerian Digraphs: Bounded Carving Width

Discrete Mathematics 2026-05-11 v1 Combinatorics

Abstract

We prove that every class of Eulerian directed graphs of bounded carving width (equivalently of bounded degree and treewidth) is well-quasi-ordered by strong immersion. In fact, we prove a stronger result, namely that every class of Eulerian directed graphs of bounded carving width, where every vertex is additionally labeled from a well-quasi-order, fixes a linear order on its incident edges, and may impose further restrictions on how the immersion is allowed to route paths through it, is well-quasi-ordered by an adequate notion of strong immersion. To this extent, we develop a framework seemingly suited to prove well-quasi-ordering for classes of Eulerian directed graphs by (strong) immersion and present a first meta theorem in that direction. We complement our results by observing that the class of Eulerian directed graphs of unbounded degree is \emph{not} well-quasi-ordered by \emph{strong} immersion, even if we assume the treewidth of the class to be at most two. We conclude with a dichotomy result, proving for a very restricted class of Eulerian directed graphs of unbounded degree that it is not well-quasi-ordered by strong immersion, but it is well-quasi-ordered by weak immersion.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.07468,
  title  = {Well-Quasi-Ordering Eulerian Digraphs: Bounded Carving Width},
  author = {Dario Cavallaro and Ken-ichi Kawarabayashi and Stephan Kreutzer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.07468},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Full Version of the respective paper appearing at ICALP 2026. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2509.26260

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:57:17.378Z