An oriented colouring of an oriented graph is assignment of colours to the vertices such that no two arcs receive ordered pairs of colours and . It is equivalent to a homomorphism of the digraph onto some tournament of order .
Raspaud and Sopena [RS] showed using Borodin's result about acyclic chromatic number of planar graphs, that every planar oriented graph has oriented chromatic number at most 80. (Their motivation came from a work of Courcelle [C] concerning the monadic second-order logic of graphs. That, however, deals with a stronger variant of coloring.)
On the other hand, Marshall [M] showed that there is an oriented planar graph with oriented chromatic number at least~17.
Bibliography
[C] B. Courcelle, The monadic second order logic of graphs VI: On several representations of graphs by relational structures, Discrete Appl. Math. 54 ( 1994),
[M] T. H. Marshall. On -universal graphs. Research Report 2001-510, KAM-DIMATIA Series, 2001.
*[RS] A. Raspaud and E. Sopena. Good and semi-strong colorings of oriented planar graphs. Inform. Process. Lett., 51(4):171–174, 1994. MathSciNet
* indicates original appearance(s) of problem.