On constrained intersection representations of graphs and digraphs

Abstract

We study the problem of determining optimal directed intersection representations of DAGs in a model introduced by Kostochka, Liu, Machado, and Milenkovic [ISIT2019]: vertices are assigned color sets so that there is an arc from a vertex $u$ to a vertex $v$ if and only if their color sets have nonempty intersection and $v$ gets assigned strictly more colors than $u$, and the goal is to minimize the total number of colors. We show that the problem is polynomially solvable in the class of triangle-free and Hamiltonian DAGs and also disclose the relationship of this problem with several other models of intersection representations of graphs and digraphs.