The structure of digraphs with excess one

Abstract

AbstractA digraph is ‐geodetic if for any (not necessarily distinct) vertices there is at most one directed walk from to with length not exceeding . The order of a ‐geodetic digraph with minimum out‐degree is bounded below by the directed Moore bound . The Moore bound can be met only in the trivial cases and , so it is of interest to look for ‐geodetic digraphs with out‐degree and smallest possible order , where is the excess of the digraph. Miller, Miret and Sillasen recently ruled out the existence of digraphs with excess one for and and for and . We conjecture that there are no digraphs with excess one for and in this paper we investigate the structure of minimal counterexamples to this conjecture. We severely constrain the possible structures of the outlier function and prove the nonexistence of certain digraphs with degree three and excess one, as well closing the open cases and left by the analysis of Miller et al. We further show that there are no involutary digraphs with excess one, that is, the outlier function of any such digraph must contain a cycle of length .