Strong orientation

In graph theory, a strong orientation of an undirected graph is an assignment of a direction to each edge (an orientation) that makes it into a strongly connected graph.

Strong orientations have been applied to the design of one-way road networks. According to Robbins' theorem, the graphs with strong orientations are exactly the bridgeless graphs. Eulerian orientations and well-balanced orientations provide important special cases of strong orientations; in turn, strong orientations may be generalized to totally cyclic orientations of disconnected graphs. The set of strong orientations of a graph forms a partial cube, with adjacent orientations in this structure differing in the orientation of a single edge. It is possible to find a single orientation in linear time, but it is #P-complete to count the number of strong orientations of a given graph.

Robbins (1939) introduces the problem of strong orientation with a story about a town, whose streets and intersections are represented by the given graph G. According to Robbins' story, the people of the town want to be able to repair any segment of road during the weekdays, while still allowing any part of the town to be reached from any other part using the remaining roads as two-way streets. On the weekends, all roads are open, but because of heavy traffic volume, they wish to convert all roads to one-way streets and again allow any part of town to be reached from any other part. Robbins' theorem states that a system of roads is suitable for weekday repairs if and only if it is suitable for conversion to a one-way system on weekends. For this reason, his result is sometimes known as the one-way street theorem.

Subsequently to the work of Robbins, a series of papers by Roberts and Xu modeled more carefully the problem of turning a grid of two-way city streets into one-way streets, and examined the effect of this conversion on the distances between pairs of points within the grid. As they showed, the traditional one-way layout in which parallel streets alternate in direction is not optimal in keeping the pairwise distances as small as possible. However, the improved orientations that they found include points where the traffic from two one-way blocks meets itself head-on, which may be viewed as a flaw in their solutions.

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