Geodetic sets for directed acyclic planar geodetic graphs

Abstract

A set of vertices $S$ of a directed graph $G$ is geodetic if every vertex of $G$ lies on a shortest path from a vertex of $S$ to a vertex of $S$. A directed graph is geodetic if there is at most one shortest path from every vertex of $G$ to every vertex of $G$. We prove the NP-completeness of the following decision problem. Given a directed acyclic planar geodetic graph $G$ and an integer $k$, does $G$ have a geodetic set with at most $k$ vertices? This implies that the question of whether $G$ has a strong or a monitoring geodetic set with at most $k$ vertices is also NP-complete for directed acyclic planar geodetic graphs. Furthermore, we prove that the number of vertices in a minimum geodetic set and the number of vertices in a minimum edge geodetic set can be computed in linear time for directed acyclic series-parallel graphs.