Chordality of locally semicomplete and weakly quasi-transitive digraphs

Abstract Chordal graphs are important in the structural and algorithmic graph theory. A digraph analogue of chordal graphs was introduced by Haskin and Rose in 1973 but has not been the subject of active studies until recently when a characterization of semicomplete chordal digraphs in terms of forbidden subdigraphs was found by Meister and Telle. Locally semicomplete digraphs, quasi-transitive digraphs, and extended semicomplete digraphs are amongst the most popular generalizations of semicomplete digraphs. We extend the forbidden subdigraph characterization of semicomplete chordal digraphs to locally semicomplete chordal digraphs. We introduce a new class of digraphs, called weakly quasi-transitive digraphs, which contains quasi-transitive digraphs, symmetric digraphs, and extended semicomplete digraphs, but is incomparable to the class of locally semicomplete digraphs. We show that weakly quasi-transitive digraphs can be recursively constructed by simple substitutions from transitive oriented graphs, semicomplete digraphs, and symmetric digraphs. This recursive construction of weakly quasi-transitive digraphs, similar to the one for quasi-transitive digraphs, demonstrates the naturalness of the new digraph class. As a by-product, we prove that the forbidden subdigraphs for semicomplete chordal digraphs are the same for weakly quasi-transitive chordal digraphs. The forbidden subdigraph characterization of weakly quasi-transitive chordal digraphs generalizes not only the recent results on quasi-transitive chordal digraphs and extended semicomplete chordal digraphs but also the classical results on chordal graphs.