Acyclic coloring of special digraphs

Abstract: An acyclic r-coloring of a directed graph G=(V,E) is a partition of the vertex set V into r acyclic sets. The dichromatic number of a directed graph G is the smallest r such that G allows an acyclic r-coloring. For symmetric digraphs the dichromatic number equals the well-known chromatic number of the underlying undirected graph. This allows us to carry over the W[1]-hardness and lower bounds for running times of the chromatic number problem parameterized by clique-width to the dichromatic number problem parameterized by directed clique-width. We introduce the first polynomial-time algorithm for the acyclic coloring problem on digraphs of constant directed clique-width. From a parameterized point of view our algorithm shows that the Dichromatic Number problem is in XP when parameterized by directed clique-width and extends the only known structural parameterization by directed modular width for this problem. Furthermore, we apply defineability within monadic second order logic in order to show that Dichromatic Number problem is in FPT when parameterized by the directed clique-width and r. For directed co-graphs, which is a class of digraphs of directed clique-width 2, and several generalizations we even show linear time solutions for computing the dichromatic number. Furthermore, we conclude that directed co-graphs and the considered generalizations lead to subclasses of perfect digraphs. For directed cactus forests, which is a set of digraphs of directed tree-width 1, we conclude an upper bound of 2 for the dichromatic number and we show that an optimal acyclic coloring can be computed in linear time.