The Mutual-Visibility Problem In Directed Graphs

Abstract: The mutual-visibility problem, originally defined for undirected graphs, asks for the size of the maximum set of vertices $S$ such that every pair of vertices in $S$ is connected by a shortest path passing only through vertices in $V \setminus S$. In this paper, we extend this concept to directed graphs, establishing fundamental results for several graph classes. We prove that for Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), the mutual-visibility number $μ(D)$ is always 1, and for directed cycles of length $n \geq 3$, it is strictly 2. In contrast, we demonstrate that tournaments can support arbitrarily large mutual-visibility sets; specifically, using properties of Paley tournaments, we show that $μ(T)$ grows linearly with the size of the tournament. On the algorithmic side, we show that while verifying a candidate set is polynomial-time solvable ($O(|S|(|V|+|A|))$), the problem of determining $μ(D)$ is NP-hard for general digraphs. We also analyze the impact of strong bridges and strongly connected components on the upper bounds of $μ(D)$.