Feedback Arc Sets and Feedback Arc Set Decompositions in Weighted and Unweighted Oriented Graphs

Abstract: For any arc-weighted oriented graph $D=(V(D), A(D),w)$, we write ${\rm fas}_w(D)$ to denote the minimum weight of a feedback arc set in $D$. In this paper, we consider upper bounds on ${\rm fas}_w(D)$ for arc-weight oriented graphs $D$ with bounded maximum degrees and directed girth. We obtain such bounds by introducing a new parameter ${\rm fasd}(D)$, which is the maximum integer such that $A(D)$ can be partitioned into ${\rm fasd}(D)$ feedback arc sets. This new parameter seems to be interesting in its own right. We obtain several bounds for both ${\rm fas}_w(D)$ and ${\rm fasd}(D)$ when $D$ has maximum degree $\Delta(D)\le \Delta$ and directed girth $g(D)\geq g$. In particular, we show that if $\Delta(D)\leq~4$ and $g(D)\geq 3$, then ${\rm fasd}(D) \geq 3$ and therefore ${\rm fas}_w(D)\leq \frac{w(D)}{3}$ which generalizes a tight bound for an unweighted oriented graph with maximum degree at most 4. We also show that ${\rm fasd}(D)\geq g$ and ${\rm fas}_w(D) \leq \frac{w(D)}{g}$ if $\Delta(D)\leq 3$ and $g(D)\geq g$ for $g\in {3,4,5}$ and these bounds are tight. However, for $g=10$ the bound ${\rm fasd}(D)\geq g$ does not always hold when $\Delta(D)\leq 3$. Finally we give some bounds for the cases when $\Delta$ or $g$ are large.