Simpler and faster algorithms for detours in planar digraphs

In the directed detour problem one is given a digraph $G$ and a pair of vertices $s$ and~$t$, and the task is to decide whether there is a directed simple path from $s$ to $t$ in $G$ whose length is larger than $\mathsf{dist}{G}(s,t)$. The more general parameterized variant, directed long detour, asks for a simple $s$-to-$t$ path of length at least $\mathsf{dist}{G}(s,t)+k$, for a given parameter $k$. Surprisingly, it is still unknown whether directed detour is polynomial-time solvable on general digraphs. However, for planar digraphs, Wu and Wang~[Networks, '15] proposed an $\mathcal{O}(n^3)$-time algorithm for directed detour, while Fomin et al.~[STACS 2022] gave a $2^{{\mathcal{O}(k)}\cdot} n^{{\mathcal{O}(1)}$-time} fpt algorithm for directed long detour. The algorithm of Wu and Wang relies on a nontrivial analysis of how short detours may look like in a plane embedding, while the algorithm of Fomin et al.~is based on a reduction to the ${\S}$-disjoint paths problem on planar digraphs. This latter problem is solvable in polynomial time using the algebraic machinery of Schrijver~[SIAM~J.~Comp.,~'94], but the degree of the obtained polynomial factor is huge. In this paper we propose two simple algorithms: we show how to solve, in planar digraphs, directed detour in time $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ and directed long detour in time $2^{{\mathcal{O}(k)}\cdot} n⁴ \log n$. In both cases, the idea is to reduce to the $2$-disjoint paths problem in a planar digraph, and to observe that the obtained instances of this problem have a certain topological structure that makes them amenable to a direct greedy strategy.