Hoffman's coclique bound for normal regular digraphs, and nonsymmetric association schemes

Abstract

We extend Hoffman's coclique bound for regular digraphs with the property that its adjacency matrix is normal, and discuss cocliques attaining the inequality. As a consequence, we characterize skew-Bush-type Hadamard matrices in terms of digraphs. We present some normal digraphs whose vertex set is decomposed into disjoint cocliques attaining the bound. The digraphs provided here are relation graphs of some nonsymmetric association schemes.