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The Surjective H-Colouring problem is to test if a given graph allows a vertex-surjective homomorphism to a fixed graph H. The complexity of this problem has been well studied for undirected (partially) reflexive graphs. We introduce endo-triviality, the property of a structure that all of its endomorphisms that do not have range of size 1 are automorphisms, as a means to obtain complexity-theoretic classifications of Surjective H-Colouring in the case of reflexive digraphs. Chen [2014] proved, in the setting of constraint satisfaction problems, that Surjective H-Colouring is NP-complete if H has the property that all of its polymorphisms are essentially unary. We give the first concrete application of his result by showing that every endo-trivial reflexive digraph H has this property. We then use the concept of endo-triviality to prove, as our main result, a dichotomy for Surjective H-Colouring when H is a reflexive tournament: if H is transitive, then Surjective H-Colouring is in NL, otherwise it is NP-complete. By combining this result with some known and new results we obtain a complexity classification for Surjective H-Colouring when H is a partially reflexive digraph of size at most 3.
@InProceedings{larose_et_al:LIPIcs.STACS.2018.49,
author = {Larose, Benoit and Martin, Barnaby and Paulusma, Daniel},
title = {{Surjective H-Colouring over Reflexive Digraphs}},
booktitle = {35th Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2018)},
pages = {49:1--49:14},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-062-0},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2018},
volume = {96},
editor = {Niedermeier, Rolf and Vall\'{e}e, Brigitte},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2018.49},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-84882},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2018.49},
annote = {Keywords: Surjective H-Coloring, Computational Complexity, Algorithmic Graph Theory, Universal Algebra, Constraint Satisfaction}
}