Faster and Unified Algorithms for Diameter Reducing Shortcuts and Minimum Chain Covers

For an n-vertex m-edge digraph G, a D-shortcut is a small set H of directed edges taken from the transitive closure of G, satisfying that the diameter of G ∪ H is at most D. In a sequence of works [Kogan and Parter, SODA 2022 & ICALP 2022] provided shortcut algorithms with improved diameter vs. size tradeoffs. In this paper, we present faster and unified shortcut algorithms for general digraphs. These algorithms also yield improved tradeoffs for the family of bounded-width DAGs. We show: