Universal obstructions for directed pathwidth

Determine the universal butterfly-minor obstructions for directed pathwidth.

Background

The paper establishes three universal obstruction families for cycle rank, but emphasizes that analogous results are largely unknown for digraph width parameters. Directed pathwidth is identified as a particularly important case for which no comparable obstruction theorem is known.

References

What are the universal obstructions for directed pathwidth?

Unavoidable butterfly minors in digraphs of large cycle rank  (2507.11814 - Hatzel et al., 16 Jul 2025) in Section Conclusion