The Euler and Chinese Postman Problems on 2-Arc-Colored Digraphs

Abstract: The famous Chinese Postman Problem (CPP) is polynomial time solvable on both undirected and directed graphs. Gutin et al. [Discrete Applied Math 217 (2016)] generalized these results by proving that CPP on $c$-edge-colored graphs is polynomial time solvable for every $c\geq 2$. In CPP on weighted edge-colored graphs $G$, we wish to find a minimum weight properly colored closed walk containing all edges of $G$ (a walk is properly colored if every two consecutive edges are of different color, including the last and first edges in a closed walk). In this paper, we consider CPP on arc-colored digraphs (for properly colored closed directed walks), and provide a polynomial-time algorithm for the problem on weighted 2-arc-colored digraphs. This is a somewhat surprising result since it is NP-complete to decide whether a 2-arc-colored digraph has a properly colored directed cycle [Gutin et al., Discrete Math 191 (1998)]. To obtain the polynomial-time algorithm, we characterize 2-arc-colored digraphs containing properly colored Euler trails.