Extending Ghouila-Houri's Characterization of Comparability Graphs to Temporal Graphs

Abstract

An orientation of a given static graph is called transitive if for any three vertices $a,b,c$, the presence of arcs $(a,b)$ and $(b,c)$ forces the presence of the arc $(a,c)$. If only the presence of an arc between $a$ and $c$ is required, but its orientation is unconstrained, the orientation is called quasi-transitive. A fundamental result presented by Ghouila-Houri guarantees that any static graph admitting a quasi-transitive orientation also admits a transitive orientation. In a seminal work, Mertzios et al. introduced the notion of temporal transitivity in order to model information flows in simple temporal networks. We revisit the model introduced by Mertzios et al. and propose an analogous to Ghouila-Houri's characterization for the temporal scenario. We present a structure theorem that will allow us to express by a 2-SAT formula all the constraints imposed by temporal transitive orientations. The latter produces an efficient recognition algorithm for graphs admitting such orientations. Additionally, we extend the temporal transitivity model to temporal graphs having multiple time-labels associated to their edges and claim that the previous results hold in the multilabel setting. Finally, we propose a characterization of temporal comparability graphs via forbidden temporal ordered patterns.

The original paper by Ghouila-Houry on transitive orientations was written in French and published in "Comptes Rendus de l'Academie des Sciences" in 1962. Since his proof is short and elegant, we thought it would be nice to provide a translation of it to English to make it accessible to anyone. We added this translation in the appendix 6.1 of our paper