Weak degeneracy of planar graphs and locally planar graphs

Weak degeneracy is a variation of degeneracy which shares many nice properties of degeneracy. In particular, if a graph $G$ is weakly $d$-degenerate, then for any $(d + 1)$-list assignment $L$ of $G$, one can construct an $L$-coloring of $G$ by a modified greedy coloring algorithm. It is known that planar graphs of girth 5 are 3-choosable and locally planar graphs are 5-choosable. This paper strengthens these results and proves that planar graphs of girth 5 are weakly 2-degenerate and locally planar graphs are weakly 4-degenerate.Comment: 13page

Small cycle cover, group coloring with related problems

Bondy conjectured that if G is a simple 2-connected graph with n ≥ 3 vertices, then the edges of G can be covered by at most 2n-33 cycles. In Chapter 2, a result on small cycle cover is obtained and we also show that the result is as best as possible.;Thomassen conjectured that every 4-connected line graph is hamiltonian. In Chapters 3 and 4, we apply Catlin\u27s reduction method to study cycles in line graphs. Results about hamiltonian connectivity of line graphs and 3-edge-connected graphs are obtained. Several former results are extended.;Jaeger, Linial, Payan and Tarsi introduced group coloring in 1992 and proved that the group chromatic number for every planar graph is at most 6. It is shown that the bound 6 can be decreased to 5. Jaeger, Linial, Payan and Tarsi also proved that the group chromatic number for every planar graph with girth at least 4 is at most 4. Chapters 5 and 6 are devoted to the study of group coloring of graphs.;The concept of list coloring, choosability and choice number was introduced by Erdos, Rubin and Taylor in 1979 and Vizing in 1976. Alon and Tarsi proved that every bipartite planar graph is 3-choosable. Thomassen showed that every planar graph is 5-choosable and that every planar graph with girth at least 5 is 3-choosable. In Chapter 7, results on list coloring are obtained, extending a former result of Thomassen

Distributed coloring in sparse graphs with fewer colors

This paper is concerned with efficiently coloring sparse graphs in the distributed setting with as few colors as possible. According to the celebrated Four Color Theorem, planar graphs can be colored with at most 4 colors, and the proof gives a (sequential) quadratic algorithm finding such a coloring. A natural problem is to improve this complexity in the distributed setting. Using the fact that planar graphs contain linearly many vertices of degree at most 6, Goldberg, Plotkin, and Shannon obtained a deterministic distributed algorithm coloring $n$-vertex planar graphs with 7 colors in $O(\log n)$ rounds. Here, we show how to color planar graphs with 6 colors in \mbox{polylog}(n) rounds. Our algorithm indeed works more generally in the list-coloring setting and for sparse graphs (for such graphs we improve by at least one the number of colors resulting from an efficient algorithm of Barenboim and Elkin, at the expense of a slightly worst complexity). Our bounds on the number of colors turn out to be quite sharp in general. Among other results, we show that no distributed algorithm can color every $n$-vertex planar graph with 4 colors in $o(n)$ rounds.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures - An extended abstract of this work was presented at PODC'18 (ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing

Near-colorings: non-colorable graphs and NP-completeness

A graph G is (d_1,..,d_l)-colorable if the vertex set of G can be partitioned into subsets V_1,..,V_l such that the graph G[V_i] induced by the vertices of V_i has maximum degree at most d_i for all 1 <= i <= l. In this paper, we focus on complexity aspects of such colorings when l=2,3. More precisely, we prove that, for any fixed integers k,j,g with (k,j) distinct form (0,0) and g >= 3, either every planar graph with girth at least g is (k,j)-colorable or it is NP-complete to determine whether a planar graph with girth at least g is (k,j)-colorable. Also, for any fixed integer k, it is NP-complete to determine whether a planar graph that is either (0,0,0)-colorable or non-(k,k,1)-colorable is (0,0,0)-colorable. Additionally, we exhibit non-(3,1)-colorable planar graphs with girth 5 and non-(2,0)-colorable planar graphs with girth 7