The dag-width of directed graphs

Tree-width is a well-known metric on undirected graphs that measures how tree-like a graph is and gives a notion of graph decomposition that proves useful in algorithm design. Tree-width can be characterised by a graph searching game where a number of cops attempt to capture a robber. We consider the natural adaptation of this game to directed graphs and show that monotone strategies in the game yield a measure, called dag-width, that can be seen to describe how close a directed graph is to a directed acyclic graph (dag). We also provide an associated decomposition and show how it is useful for developing algorithms on directed graphs. In particular, we show that the problem of determining the winner of a parity game is solvable in polynomial time on graphs of bounded dag-width. We also consider the relationship between dag-width and other connectivity measures such as directed tree-width and path-width. A consequence we obtain is that certain NP-complete problems such as Hamiltonicity and disjoint paths are polynomial-time computable on graphs of bounded dag-width.