Not necessarily proper total colourings which are adjacent vertex distinguishing

Let G be a simple graph with no isolated edge. Let f be a total colouring of G which is not necessarily proper. f is said to be adjacent vertex distinguishing if for any pair of adjacent vertices u, v of G, we have C(u)≠C(v), where C(u) denotes the set of colours of u and its incident edges under f. The minimum number of colours required for an adjacent vertex distinguishing not necessarily proper total colouring of G is called the adjacent vertex distinguishing not necessarily proper total chromatic number. Seven kinds of adjacent vertex distinguishing not necessarily proper total colourings are introduced in this paper. Some results of adjacent vertex distinguishing not necessarily proper total chromatic numbers are obtained and some conjectures are also proposed.     

Analysis of a heuristic for acyclic edge colouring

An acyclic edge colouring of a graph is a proper edge colouring in which the union of any two colour classes does not contain a cycle, that is, forms a forest. It is known that there exists such a colouring using at most 16Δ(G) colours where Δ(G) denotes the maximum degree of a graph G. However, no non-trivial constructive bound (which works for all graphs) is known except for the straightforward distance 2 colouring which requires Δ² colours. We analyse a simple O(mnΔ²²(logΔ)) time greedy heuristic and show that it uses at most 5Δ(logΔ+2) colours on any graph.     

Vertex arboricity of planar graphs without chordal 6-cycles

The vertex arboricity va(G) of a graph G is the minimum number of colours the vertices can be coloured so that each colour class induces a forest. It was known that va(G)≤3 for every planar graph G, and the problem of computing vertex arboricity of graphs is NP-hard. In this paper, we prove that va(G)≤2 if G is a planar graph without chordal 6-cycles. This extends a result by Raspaud and Wang [On the vertex-arboricity of planar graphs, Eur. J. Combin. 29 (2008), pp. 1064–1075].     

Acyclic edge colourings of graphs with the number of edges linearly bounded by the number of vertices

Let G be any finite graph. A mapping c:E(G)→{1,…,k} is called an acyclic edge k-colouring of G, if any two adjacent edges have different colours and there are no bichromatic cycles in G. In other words, for every pair of distinct colours i and j, the subgraph induced in G by all the edges that have colour i or j is acyclic. The smallest number k of colours such that G has an acyclic edge k-colouring is called the acyclic chromatic index of G and is denoted by .Determining the acyclic chromatic index of a graph is a hard problem, both from theoretical and algorithmical point of view. In 1991, Alon et al. proved that for any graph G of maximum degree Δ(G). This bound was later improved to 16Δ(G) by Molloy and Reed. In general, the problem of computing the acyclic chromatic index of a graph is NP-complete. Only a few algorithms for finding acyclic edge colourings have been known by now. Moreover, these algorithms work only for graphs from particular classes.In our paper, we prove that for every graph G which satisfies the condition that |E(G^′)|?t|V(G^′)|−1 for each subgraph G^′⊆G, where t?2 is a given integer, the constant p=2t³−3t+2. Based on that result, we obtain a polynomial algorithm which computes such a colouring. The class of graphs covered by our theorem is quite rich, for example, it contains all t-degenerate graphs.     

Local colourings of Cartesian product graphs

A local colouring of a graph G is a function c: V(G)→? such that for each S ? V(G), 2≤|S|≤3, there exist u, v∈S with |c(u)?c(v)| at least the number of edges in the subgraph induced by S. The maximum colour assigned by c is the value χ_?(c) of c, and the local chromatic number of G is χ_?(G)=min {χ_?(c): c is a local colouring of G}. In this note the local chromatic number is determined for Cartesian products G □ H, where G and GH are 3-colourable graphs. This result in part corrects an error from Omoomi and Pourmiri [On the local colourings of graphs, Ars Combin. 86 (2008), pp. 147–159]. It is also proved that if G and H are graphs such that χ(G)≤? χ_?(H)/2 ?, then χ_?(G □ H)≤χ_?(H)+1.     

On the Grundy and b-Chromatic Numbers of a Graph

The Grundy number of a graph G, denoted by Γ(G), is the largest k such that G has a greedy k-colouring, that is a colouring with k colours obtained by applying the greedy algorithm according to some ordering of the vertexes of G. The b-chromatic number of a graph G, denoted by χ _b (G), is the largest k such that G has a b-colouring with k colours, that is a colouring in which each colour class contains a b-vertex, a vertex with neighbours in all other colour classes. Trivially χ _b (G),Γ(G)≤Δ(G)+1. In this paper, we show that deciding if Γ(G)≤Δ(G) is NP-complete even for a bipartite graph G. We then show that deciding if Γ(G)≥|V(G)|?k or if χ _b (G)≥|V(G)|?k are fixed parameter tractable problems with respect to the parameter k.     

On equitable colouring of Knödel graphs

The notion of equitable colouring was introduced by Meyer in 1973. In this paper we find the equitable chromatic number χ₌ for the line graph of Knödel graphs L(W_{Δ, n}), central graph of Knödel graphs C(W_{Δ, n}) and corona graph of Knödel graphs W_{Δ, m}° W_{Δ, n}. As a by-product we obtain a new class of graphs that confirm Equitable Colouring Conjecture.     

Maximal matching and edge domination in complete multipartite graphs

For any graph G, let α′(G) and α′_min(G) be the maximum cardinality and minimum cardinality among all maximal matchings in G, respectively, and let γ′(G) and γ_t ′(G) be the edge domination number and edge total domination number of G, respectively. In this paper, we first show some properties of maximal matchings and further determine the exact values of α′(G) and α′_min(G) for a complete multipartite graph G. Then, we disclose relationships between maximal matchings and minimal edge dominating sets, and thus obtain the exact values of γ′(G) and γ_t′(G) for a complete multipartite graph G.     

Edge colourings of embedded graphs without 4-cycles or chordal-4-cycles

Let G be a simple graph embedded in a surface Σ of Euler characteristic χ(Σ)≥0, and let χ′(G) and Δ denote the chromatic index and the maximum degree of G, respectively. The paper shows that χ′(G)=Δ if Δ≥6 and G does not contain chordal-4-cycles or Δ≥5 and G does not contain 4-cycles.     

A sufficient condition for a graph to be an (a,b, k)-critical graph

Let G be a graph, and let a, b, k be integers with 0≤a≤b, k≥0. An [a, b]-factor of graph G is defined as a spanning subgraph F of G such that a≤d _F (x)≤b for each x∈V(G). Then a graph G is called an (a, b, k)-critical graph if after deleting any k vertices of G the remaining graph of G has an [a, b]-factor. In this article, a sufficient condition is given, which is a neighborhood condition for a graph G to be an (a, b, k)-critical graph.     

On the L(2, 1)-labelling of block graphs

The distance-two labelling problem of graphs was proposed by Griggs and Roberts in 1988, and it is a variation of the frequency assignment problem introduced by Hale in 1980. An L(2, 1)-labelling of a graph G is an assignment of non-negative integers to the vertices of G such that vertices at distance two receive different numbers and adjacent vertices receive different and non-consecutive integers. The L(2, 1)-labelling number of G, denoted by λ(G), is the smallest integer k such that G has a L(2, 1)-labelling in which no label is greater than k.

In this work, we study the L(2, 1)-labelling problem on block graphs. We find upper bounds for λ(G) in the general case and reduce those bounds for some particular cases of block graphs with maximum clique size equal to 3.     

About acyclic edge colourings of planar graphs

Let G=(V,E) be any finite simple graph. A mapping is called an acyclic edge k-colouring of G, if any two adjacent edges have different colours and there are no bichromatic cycles in G. In other words, for every pair of distinct colours i and j, the subgraph induced by all the edges which have either colour i or j is acyclic. The smallest number k of colours, such that G has an acyclic edge k-colouring is called the acyclic chromatic index of G and is denoted by .In 1991, Alon et al. [N. Alon, C.J.H. McDiarmid, B.A. Reed, Acyclic coloring of graphs, Random Structures and Algorithms 2 (1991) 277-288] proved that for any graph G of maximum degree Δ(G). This bound was later improved to 16Δ(G) by Molloy and Reed in [M. Molloy, B. Reed, Further algorithmic aspects of the local lemma, in: Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 1998, pp. 524-529].In this paper we prove that for a planar graph G without cycles of length three and that the same holds if G has an edge-partition into two forests. We also show that if G is planar.     

On maximal 3-restricted edge connectivity of regular graphs

Let G be a k-regular graph of order at least nine. It is proved in this work that graph G is maximally 3-restricted edge-connected if it is triangle-free and k>|G|/4+1, the lower bound on k is sharp to some extent. With this observation, we present an expression of the number of edge cuts in the previous graph, which may be employed to analyse the reliability of telecommunication networks.     

Independence and k-domination in graphs

A subset S of vertices of a graph G is k-dominating if every vertex not in S has at least k neighbours in S. The k-domination number γ _k (G) is the minimum cardinality of a k-dominating set of G, and α(G) denotes the cardinality of a maximum independent set of G. Brook's well-known bound for the chromatic number χ and the inequality α(G)≥n(G)/χ(G) for a graph G imply that α(G)≥n(G)/Δ(G) when G is non-regular and α(G)≥n(G)/(Δ(G)+1) otherwise. In this paper, we present a new proof of this property and derive some bounds on γ _k (G). In particular, we show that, if G is connected with δ(G)≥k then γ _k (G)≤(Δ(G)?1)α(G) with the exception of G being a cycle of odd length or the complete graph of order k+1. Finally, we characterize the connected non-regular graphs G satisfying equality in these bounds and present a conjecture for the regular case.     

A learning approach to the bandwidth multicolouring problem

In this article, a generalisation of the vertex colouring problem known as bandwidth multicolouring problem (BMCP), in which a set of colours is assigned to each vertex such that the difference between the colours, assigned to each vertex and its neighbours, is by no means less than a predefined threshold, is considered. It is shown that the proposed method can be applied to solve the bandwidth colouring problem (BCP) as well. BMCP is known to be NP-hard in graph theory, and so a large number of approximation solutions, as well as exact algorithms, have been proposed to solve it. In this article, two learning automata-based approximation algorithms are proposed for estimating a near-optimal solution to the BMCP. We show, for the first proposed algorithm, that by choosing a proper learning rate, the algorithm finds the optimal solution with a probability close enough to unity. Moreover, we compute the worst-case time complexity of the first algorithm for finding a 1/(1–?) optimal solution to the given problem. The main advantage of this method is that a trade-off between the running time of algorithm and the colour set size (colouring optimality) can be made, by a proper choice of the learning rate also. Finally, it is shown that the running time of the proposed algorithm is independent of the graph size, and so it is a scalable algorithm for large graphs. The second proposed algorithm is compared with some well-known colouring algorithms and the results show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm in terms of the colour set size and running time of algorithm.     

Component connectivity of generalized Petersen graphs

Let G be a simple non-complete graph of order n. The r-component edge connectivity of G denoted as λ_r (G) is the minimum number of edges that must be removed from G in order to obtain a graph with (at least) r connected components. The concept of r-component edge connectivity generalizes that of edge connectivity by taking into account the number of components of the resulting graph. In this paper we establish bounds of the r component edge connectivity of an important family of interconnection network models, the generalized Petersen graphs GP(n, k) in which n and k are relatively prime integers.