Has the following object been defined in the literature? What is it called? And what literature studies it? Are there other characterizations of this? What properties are known?
Let $G$ be a directed loopless connected graph. The Acyclic Partition (AP) of $G$ is a partition of vertices $S = \{S_1, S_2, \ldots, S_k\}$ of $G$ with the following properties:
1) Each simple cycle $(v_{i_1}, \ldots, v_{i_n})$ of $G$ is contained in exactly one $S_i \in S$.
2) If $u,v \in S_i \in S$, and there is a path between $u$ and $v$, then all paths between $u$ and $v$ are completely contained in $S_i$.
If $S_i, S_j \in S$ and $(S \setminus \{S_i, S_j\}) \cup \{S_i \cup S_j\}$ is an AP, then I call $S$ reducible.
For a given graph $G$, I am interested in its irreducible AP of maximum cardinality.
Update:
I'd like to clarify between an irreducible AP and a Strong Components decomposition. In the example graph shown in the image below, a Strong Components algorithm would return three components $\{\{1,2\}, \{3\}, \{4,5\}\}$ , assuming a single vertex is defined to be connected to itself.
The Strong Component decomposition described above would be an AP. But since $\{\{1,2, 3\}, \{4,5\}\}$ is also an AP and is irreducible, it would be the preferred AP. (Irreducible APs are not necessarily unique.) This illustrates how APs are different from Strong Component decompositions.
Thank you.