Minimum Cost Homomorphisms to Semicomplete Bipartite Digraphs

Abstract

For digraphs $D$ and $H$, a mapping $f: V(D)\dom V(H)$ is a homomorphism of $D$ to $H$ if $uv\in A(D)$ implies $f(u)f(v)\in A(H).$ If, moreover, each vertex $u\in V(D)$ is associated with costs $c_i(u),i\in V(H)$, then the cost of the homomorphism $f$ is ${\sum }_{u\in V(D)}{c}_{f(u)}(u)$. For each fixed digraph $H$, we have the {\em minimum cost homomorphism problem for} $H$. The problem is to decide, for an input graph $D$ with costs $c_i(u),$ $u\in V(D),i\in V(H)$, whether there exists a homomorphism of $D$ to $H$ and, if one exists, to find one of minimum cost. Minimum cost homomorphism problems encompass (or are related to) many well studied optimization problems. We describe a dichotomy of the minimum cost homomorphism problem for semicomplete multipartite digraphs $H$. This solves an open problem from an earlier paper. To obtain the dichotomy of this paper, we introduce and study a new notion, a $k$-Min-Max ordering of digraphs.