English

Parking functions for trees and mappings

Combinatorics 2015-04-21 v1

Abstract

We apply the concept of parking functions to rooted labelled trees and functional digraphs of mappings (i.e., functions f:[n][n]f : [n] \to [n]) by considering the nodes as parking spaces and the directed edges as one-way streets: Each driver has a preferred parking space and starting with this node he follows the edges in the graph until he either finds a free parking space or all reachable parking spaces are occupied. If all drivers are successful we speak about a parking function for the tree or mapping. We transfer well-known characterizations of parking functions to trees and mappings. Especially, this yields bounds and characterizations of the extremal cases for the number of parking functions with mm drivers for a given tree TT of size nn. Via analytic combinatorics techniques we study the total number Fn,mF_{n,m} and Mn,mM_{n,m} of tree and mapping parking functions, respectively, i.e., the number of pairs (T,s)(T,s) (or (f,s)(f,s)), with TT a size-nn tree (or f:[n][n]f : [n] \to [n] an nn-mapping) and s[n]ms \in [n]^{m} a parking function for TT (or for ff) with mm drivers, yielding exact and asymptotic results. We describe the phase change behaviour appearing at m=n2m=\frac{n}{2} for Fn,mF_{n,m} and Mn,mM_{n,m}, respectively, and relate it to previously studied combinatorial contexts. Moreover, we give a bijective proof of the occurring relation nFn,m=Mn,mn F_{n,m} = M_{n,m}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1504.04972,
  title  = {Parking functions for trees and mappings},
  author = {Marie-Louise Bruner and Alois Panholzer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.04972},
  year   = {2015}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:18:50.569Z