Remarks on the Local Irregularity Conjecture

A locally irregular graph is a graph in which the end vertices of every edge have distinct degrees. A locally irregular edge coloring of a graph G is any edge coloring of G such that each of the colors induces a locally irregular subgraph of G. A graph G is colorable if it allows a locally irregular edge coloring. The locally irregular chromatic index of a colorable graph G, denoted by χirr′(G), is the smallest number of colors used by a locally irregular edge coloring of G. The local irregularity conjecture claims that all graphs, except odd-length paths, odd-length cycles and a certain class of cacti are colorable by three colors. As the conjecture is valid for graphs with a large minimum degree and all non-colorable graphs are vertex disjoint cacti, we study rather sparse graphs. In this paper, we give a cactus graph B which contradicts this conjecture, i.e., χirr′(B)=4. Nevertheless, we show that the conjecture holds for unicyclic graphs and cacti with vertex disjoint cycles.

Hamiltonian Cycles Passing Through Prescribed Edges in Locally Twisted Cubes

Let [Formula: see text] be a set of edges whose induced subgraph consists of vertex-disjoint paths in an [Formula: see text]-dimensional locally twisted cube [Formula: see text]. In this paper, we prove that if [Formula: see text] contains at most [Formula: see text] edges, then [Formula: see text] contains a Hamiltonian cycle passing through every edge of [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text]. [Formula: see text] has a Hamiltonian cycle passing through at most one prescribed edge.

Jones' Conjecture in Subcubic Graphs

We confirm Jones' Conjecture for subcubic graphs. Namely, if a subcubic planar graph does not contain $k+1$ vertex-disjoint cycles, then it suffices to delete $2k$ vertices to obtain a forest.

A NOTE ON GENERALIZED RAINBOW CONNECTION OF CONNECTED GRAPHS AND THEIR NUMBER OF EDGES

Let l ≥ 1, k ≥ 1 be two integers. Given an edge-coloured connected graph G. A path P in the graph G is called l-rainbow path if each subpath of length at most l + 1 is rainbow. The graph G is called (k, l)-rainbow connected if any two vertices in G are connected by at least k pairwise internally vertex-disjoint l-rainbow paths. The smallest number of colours needed in order to make G (k, l)-rainbow connected is called the (k, l)-rainbow connection number of G and denoted by rck,l(G). In this paper, we first focus to improve the upper bound of the (1, l)-rainbow connection number depending on the size of connected graphs. Using this result, we characterize all connected graphs having the large (1, 2)-rainbow connection number. Moreover, we also determine the (1, l)-rainbow connection number in a connected graph G containing a sequence of cut-edges.

Unpaired Many-to-Many Disjoint Path Cover of Balanced Hypercubes

A many-to-many [Formula: see text]-disjoint path cover ([Formula: see text]-DPC) of a graph [Formula: see text] is a set of [Formula: see text] vertex-disjoint paths joining [Formula: see text] distinct pairs of source and sink in which each vertex of [Formula: see text] is contained exactly once in a path. The balanced hypercube [Formula: see text], a variant of the hypercube, was introduced as a desired interconnection network topology. Let [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] be any two sets of vertices in different partite sets of [Formula: see text] ([Formula: see text]). Cheng et al. in [Appl. Math. Comput. 242 (2014) 127–142] proved that there exists paired many-to-many 2-disjoint path cover of [Formula: see text] when [Formula: see text]. In this paper, we prove that there exists unpaired many-to-many [Formula: see text]-disjoint path cover of [Formula: see text] ([Formula: see text]) from [Formula: see text] to [Formula: see text], which has improved some known results. The upper bound [Formula: see text] is best possible in terms of the number of disjoint paths in unpaired many-to-many [Formula: see text]-DPC of [Formula: see text].

On the edit distance function of the random graph

Given a hereditary property of graphs $\mathcal{H}$ and a $p\in [0,1]$ , the edit distance function $\textrm{ed}_{\mathcal{H}}(p)$ is asymptotically the maximum proportion of edge additions plus edge deletions applied to a graph of edge density p sufficient to ensure that the resulting graph satisfies $\mathcal{H}$ . The edit distance function is directly related to other well-studied quantities such as the speed function for $\mathcal{H}$ and the $\mathcal{H}$ -chromatic number of a random graph. Let $\mathcal{H}$ be the property of forbidding an Erdős–Rényi random graph $F\sim \mathbb{G}(n_0,p_0)$ , and let $\varphi$ represent the golden ratio. In this paper, we show that if $p_0\in [1-1/\varphi,1/\varphi]$ , then a.a.s. as $n_0\to\infty$ , \begin{align*} {\textrm{ed}}_{\mathcal{H}}(p) = (1+o(1))\,\frac{2\log n_0}{n_0} \cdot\min\left\{ \frac{p}{-\log(1-p_0)}, \frac{1-p}{-\log p_0} \right\}. \end{align*} Moreover, this holds for $p\in [1/3,2/3]$ for any $p_0\in (0,1)$ . A primary tool in the proof is the categorization of p-core coloured regularity graphs in the range $p\in[1-1/\varphi,1/\varphi]$ . Such coloured regularity graphs must have the property that the non-grey edges form vertex-disjoint cliques.

The Linkedness of Cubical Polytopes: The Cube

The paper is concerned with the linkedness of the graphs of cubical polytopes. A graph with at least $2k$ vertices is $k$-linked if, for every set of $k$ disjoint pairs of vertices, there are $k$ vertex-disjoint paths joining the vertices in the pairs. We say that a polytope is $k$-linked if its graph is $k$-linked. We establish that the $d$-dimensional cube is $\lfloor (d+1)/2 \rfloor$-linked, for every $d\ne 3$; this is the maximum possible linkedness of a $d$-polytope. This result implies that, for every $d\geqslant 1$, a cubical $d$-polytope is $\lfloor d/2\rfloor$-linked, which answers a question of Wotzlaw (Incidence graphs and unneighborly polytopes, Ph.D. thesis, 2009). Finally, we introduce the notion of strong linkedness, which is slightly stronger than that of linkedness. A graph $G$ is strongly $k$-linked if it has at least $2k+1$ vertices and, for every vertex $v$ of $G$, the subgraph $G-v$ is $k$-linked. We show that cubical 4-polytopes are strongly $2$-linked and that, for each $d\geqslant 1$, $d$-dimensional cubes are strongly $\lfloor d/2\rfloor$-linked.

Computing directed Steiner path covers

In this article we consider the Directed Steiner Path Cover problem on directed co-graphs. Given a directed graph $$G=(V,E)$$ G = ( V , E ) and a set $$T \subseteq V$$ T ⊆ V of so-called terminal vertices, the problem is to find a minimum number of vertex-disjoint simple directed paths, which contain all terminal vertices and a minimum number of non-terminal vertices (Steiner vertices). The primary minimization criteria is the number of paths. We show how to compute in linear time a minimum Steiner path cover for directed co-graphs. This leads to a linear time computation of an optimal directed Steiner path on directed co-graphs, if it exists. Since the Steiner path problem generalizes the Hamiltonian path problem, our results imply the first linear time algorithm for the directed Hamiltonian path problem on directed co-graphs. We also give binary integer programs for the (directed) Hamiltonian path problem, for the (directed) Steiner path problem, and for the (directed) Steiner path cover problem. These integer programs can be used to minimize change-over times in pick-and-place machines used by companies in electronic industry.

A fast $$(2 + \frac{2}{7})$$-approximation algorithm for capacitated cycle covering

We consider the capacitated cycle covering problem: given an undirected, complete graph G with metric edge lengths and demands on the vertices, we want to cover the vertices with vertex-disjoint cycles, each serving a demand of at most one. The objective is to minimize a linear combination of the total length and the number of cycles. This problem is closely related to the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP) and other cycle cover problems such as min-max cycle cover and bounded cycle cover. We show that a greedy algorithm followed by a post-processing step yields a $$(2 + \frac{2}{7})$$ ( 2 + 2 7 ) -approximation for this problem by comparing the solution to a polymatroid relaxation. We also show that the analysis of our algorithm is tight and provide a $$2 + \epsilon $$ 2 + ϵ lower bound for the relaxation.