Homotopy Groups and Puppe Sequence of Digraphs

Abstract

We introduce homotopy groups of digraphs that admit an intuitive description of grid structures, which is a variation of the GLMY homotopy groups introduced by Grigor'yan, Lin, Muranov and Yau in 2014. This direct approach enables a descriptive interpretation of GLMY theory in applications such as network science. Furthermore, we prove that there exists a long exact sequence of homotopy groups of digraphs associated to any based digraph map, that is, there exists a digraph version of the Puppe sequence.