$2$-blocks in strongly biconnected directed graphs

Abstract

A directed graph $G=(V,E)$ is called strongly biconnected if $G$ is strongly connected and the underlying graph of $G$ is biconnected. A strongly biconnected component of a strongly connected graph $G=(V,E)$ is a maximal vertex subset $L\subseteq V$ such that the induced subgraph on $L$ is strongly biconnected. Let $G=(V,E)$ be a strongly biconnected directed graph. A $2$-edge-biconnected block in $G$ is a maximal vertex subset $U\subseteq V$ such that for any two distict vertices $v,w \in U$ and for each edge $b\in E$, the vertices $v,w$ are in the same strongly biconnected components of $G\setminus\left\lbrace b\right\rbrace $. A $2$-strong-biconnected block in $G$ is a maximal vertex subset $U\subseteq V$ of size at least $2$ such that for every pair of distinct vertices $v,w\in U$ and for every vertex $z\in V\setminus\left\lbrace v,w \right\rbrace $, the vertices $v$ and $w$ are in the same strongly biconnected component of $G\setminus \left\lbrace v,w \right\rbrace $. In this paper we study $2$-edge-biconnected blocks and $2$-strong biconnected blocks.