We consider the problem of orienting a given, undirected graph into a (directed) acyclic graph such that the in-degree of each vertex ν is in a prescribed list λ(ν). Variants of this problem have been studied for a long time and with various applications, but mostly without the requirement for acyclicity. Without this requirement, the problem is closely related to the classical General Factor problem, which is known to be NP-hard in general, but polynomial-time solvable if no list λ(ν) contains large "gaps" [Cornuejols, J. Comb. Theory B, 1988]. In contrast, we show that deciding if an acyclic orientation exists is NP-hard even in the absence of such "gaps". On the positive side, we design parameterized algorithms for various, natural parameterizations of the acyclic orientation problem. A special case of the orientation problem with degree constraints recently came up in the context of reconstructing evolutionary histories (that is, phylogenetic networks). This phylogenetic setting imposes additional structure onto the problem that can be exploited algorithmically, allowing us to show fixed-parameter tractability when parameterized by either the treewidth of G (a smaller parameter than the frequently employed "level"), by the number of vertices ν for which |λ(ν)| ≥ 2, by the number of vertices ν for which the highest value in λ(ν) is at least 2. While the latter result can be extended to the general degree-constraint acyclic orientation problem, we show that the former cannot unless FPT=W[1].

Phylogenetic Diversity (PD) is a measure of the overall biodiversity of a set of present-day species (taxa) within a phylogenetic tree. We consider an extension of PD to phylogenetic networks. Given a phylogenetic network with weighted edges and a subset S of leaves, the all-paths phylogenetic diversity of S is the summed weight of all edges on a path from the root to some leaf in S. The problem of finding a bounded-size set S that maximizes this measure is polynomial-time solvable on trees, but NP-hard on networks. We study the latter from a parameterized perspective. While this problem is W[2]-hard with respect to the size of S (and W[1]-hard with respect to the size of the complement of S), we show that it is FPT with respect to several other parameters, including the phylogenetic diversity of S, the acceptable loss of phylogenetic diversity, the number of reticulations in the network, and the treewidth of the underlying graph.

We study a generalization of the classic Spanning Tree problem that allows for a non-uniform failure model. More precisely, edges are either safe or unsafe and we assume that failures only affect unsafe edges. In Unweighted Flexible Graph Connectivity we are given an undirected graph G = (V,E) in which the edge set E is partitioned into a set S of safe edges and a set U of unsafe edges and the task is to find a set T of at most k edges such that T -{u} is connected and spans V for any unsafe edge u ∈ T. Unweighted Flexible Graph Connectivity generalizes both Spanning Tree and Hamiltonian Cycle. We study Unweighted Flexible Graph Connectivity in terms of fixed-parameter tractability (FPT). We show an almost complete dichotomy on which parameters lead to fixed-parameter tractability and which lead to hardness. To this end, we obtain FPT-time algorithms with respect to the vertex deletion distance to cluster graphs and with respect to the treewidth. By exploiting the close relationship to Hamiltonian Cycle, we show that FPT-time algorithms for many smaller parameters are unlikely under standard parameterized complexity assumptions. Regarding problem-specific parameters, we observe that Unweighted Flexible Graph Connectivity admits an FPT-time algorithm when parameterized by the number of unsafe edges. Furthermore, we investigate a below-upper-bound parameter for the number of edges of a solution. We show that this parameter also leads to an FPT-time algorithm.