A transitive orientation of a graph is an orientation of the edges that produces a transitive digraph. The modular decomposition of a graph is a canonical representation of all of its modules. Finding a transitive orientation and finding the modular decomposition are in some sense dual problems. In this paper, we describe a simple O(n + m \log n) algorithm that uses this duality to find both a transitive orientation and the modular decomposition. Though the running time is not optimal, this algorithm is much simpler than any previous algorithms that are not Ω (n^2). The best known time bounds for the problems are O(n+m) but they involve sophisticated techniques.
Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science
