Minimum diameter and cycle-diameter orientations on planar graphs

Abstract

Let G be an edge weighted undirected graph. For every pair of nodes consider the shortest cycle containing these nodes in G. The cycle diameter of G is the maximum length of a cycle in this set. Let H be a directed graph obtained by directing the edges of G. The cycle diameter of H is similarly defined except for that cycles are replaced by directed closed walks. Is there always an orientation H of G whose cycle diameter is bounded by a constant times the cycle diameter of G? We prove this property for planar graphs. These results have implications on the problem of approximating an orientation with minimum diameter