Topological Additive Numbering of Directed Acyclic Graphs

Abstract

We propose to study a problem that arises naturally from both Topological Numbering of Directed Acyclic Graphs, and Additive Coloring (also known as Lucky Labeling). Let $D$ be a digraph and $f$ a labeling of its vertices with positive integers; denote by $S(v)$ the sum of labels over all neighbors of each vertex $v$. The labeling $f$ is called \emph{topological additive numbering} if $S(u) < S(v)$ for each arc $(u,v)$ of the digraph. The problem asks to find the minimum number $k$ for which $D$ has a topological additive numbering with labels belonging to $\{ 1, \ldots, k \}$, denoted by $\eta_t(D)$. We characterize when a digraph has topological additive numberings, give a lower bound for $\eta_t(D)$, and provide an integer programming formulation for our problem, characterizing when its coefficient matrix is totally unimodular. We also present some families for which $\eta_t(D)$ can be computed in polynomial time. Finally, we prove that this problem is \np-Hard even when its input is restricted to planar bipartite digraphs.