Facets based on cycles and cliques for the acyclic coloring polytope

A coloring of a graph is an assignment of colors to its vertices such that any two vertices receive distinct colors whenever they are adjacent. An acyclic coloring is a coloring such that no cycle receives exactly two colors, and the acyclic chromatic number χA(G) of a graph G is the minimum number of colors in any such coloring of G. Given a graph G and an integer k, determining whether χA(G) ≤ k or not is NP-complete even for k = 3. The acyclic coloring problem arises in the context of efficient computations of sparse and symmetric Hessian matrices via substitution methods. In a previous work we presented facet-inducing families of valid inequalities based on induced even cycles for the polytope associated to an integer programming formulation of the acyclic coloring problem. In this work we continue with this study by introducing new families of facet-inducing inequalities based on combinations of even cycles and cliques.

The Diachromatic Number of Digraphs

We consider the extension to directed graphs of the concept of achromatic number in terms of acyclic vertex colorings. The achromatic number have been intensely studied since it was introduced by Harary, Hedetniemi and Prins in 1967. The dichromaticnumber is a generalization of the chromatic number for digraphs defined by Neumann-Lara in 1982. A coloring of a digraph is an acyclic coloring if each subdigraph induced by each chromatic class is acyclic, and a coloring is complete if for any pair of chromatic classes $x,y$, there is an arc from $x$ to $y$ and an arc from $y$ to $x$. The dichromatic and diachromatic numbers are, respectively, the smallest and the largest number of colors in a complete acyclic coloring. We give some general results for the diachromatic number and study it for tournaments. We also show that the interpolation property for complete acyclic colorings does hold and establish Nordhaus-Gaddum relations.

Acyclic 4-choosability of planar graphs without intersecting short cycles

A proper vertex coloring of [Formula: see text] is acyclic if [Formula: see text] contains no bicolored cycle. Namely, every cycle of [Formula: see text] must be colored with at least three colors. [Formula: see text] is acyclically [Formula: see text]-colorable if for a given list assignment [Formula: see text], there exists an acyclic coloring [Formula: see text] of [Formula: see text] such that [Formula: see text] for all [Formula: see text]. If [Formula: see text] is acyclically [Formula: see text]-colorable for any list assignment with [Formula: see text] for all [Formula: see text], then [Formula: see text] is acyclically [Formula: see text]-choosable. In this paper, we prove that planar graphs without intersecting [Formula: see text]-cycles are acyclically [Formula: see text]-choosable. This provides a sufficient condition for planar graphs to be acyclically 4-choosable and also strengthens a result in [M. Montassier, A. Raspaud and W. Wang, Acyclic 4-choosability of planar graphs without cycles of specific lengths, in Topics in Discrete Mathematics, Algorithms and Combinatorics, Vol. 26 (Springer, Berlin, 2006), pp. 473–491] which says that planar graphs without [Formula: see text]-, [Formula: see text]-cycles and intersecting 3-cycles are acyclically 4-choosable.