Finding a subdivision of a prescribed digraph of order 4

Description

The problem of when a given digraph contains a subdivision of a fixed digraph F is considered.Bang-Jensen et al. [2] laid out foundations for approaching this problem from the algorithmic pointof view. In this paper we give further support to several open conjectures and speculations about algorithmiccomplexity of finding F-subdivisions. In particular, up to 5 exceptions, we completely classify forwhich 4-vertex digraphs F, the F-subdivision problem is polynomial-time solvable and for which it is NPcomplete.While all NP-hardness proofs are made by reduction from some version of the 2-linkage problemin digraphs, some of the polynomial-time solvable cases involve relatively complicated algorithms.

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