Coloring, List Coloring, and Painting Squares of Graphs (and other related problems)

We survey work on coloring, list coloring, and painting squares of graphs; in particular, we consider strong edge-coloring. We focus primarily on planar graphs and other sparse classes of graphs.Comment: 32 pages, 13 figures and tables, plus 195-entry bibliography, comments are welcome, published as a Dynamic Survey in Electronic Journal of Combinatoric

The structure and the list 3-dynamic coloring of outer-1-planar graphs

An outer-1-planar graph is a graph admitting a drawing in the plane so that all vertices appear in the outer region of the drawing and every edge crosses at most one other edge. This paper establishes the local structure of outer-1-planar graphs by proving that each outer-1-planar graph contains one of the seventeen fixed configurations, and the list of those configurations is minimal in the sense that for each fixed configuration there exist outer-1-planar graphs containing this configuration that do not contain any of another sixteen configurations. There are two interesting applications of this structural theorem. First of all, we conclude that every (resp.maximal) outer-1-planar graph of minimum degree at least 2 has an edge with the sum of the degrees of its two end-vertices being at most 9 (resp.7), and this upper bound is sharp. On the other hand, we show that the list 3-dynamic chromatic number of every outer-1-planar graph is at most 6, and this upper bound is best possible

Conflict-Free Coloring of Planar Graphs

A conflict-free k-coloring of a graph assigns one of k different colors to some of the vertices such that, for every vertex v, there is a color that is assigned to exactly one vertex among v and v's neighbors. Such colorings have applications in wireless networking, robotics, and geometry, and are well-studied in graph theory. Here we study the natural problem of the conflict-free chromatic number chi_CF(G) (the smallest k for which conflict-free k-colorings exist). We provide results both for closed neighborhoods N[v], for which a vertex v is a member of its neighborhood, and for open neighborhoods N(v), for which vertex v is not a member of its neighborhood. For closed neighborhoods, we prove the conflict-free variant of the famous Hadwiger Conjecture: If an arbitrary graph G does not contain K_{k+1} as a minor, then chi_CF(G) <= k. For planar graphs, we obtain a tight worst-case bound: three colors are sometimes necessary and always sufficient. We also give a complete characterization of the computational complexity of conflict-free coloring. Deciding whether chi_CF(G)<= 1 is NP-complete for planar graphs G, but polynomial for outerplanar graphs. Furthermore, deciding whether chi_CF(G)<= 2 is NP-complete for planar graphs G, but always true for outerplanar graphs. For the bicriteria problem of minimizing the number of colored vertices subject to a given bound k on the number of colors, we give a full algorithmic characterization in terms of complexity and approximation for outerplanar and planar graphs. For open neighborhoods, we show that every planar bipartite graph has a conflict-free coloring with at most four colors; on the other hand, we prove that for k in {1,2,3}, it is NP-complete to decide whether a planar bipartite graph has a conflict-free k-coloring. Moreover, we establish that any general} planar graph has a conflict-free coloring with at most eight colors.Comment: 30 pages, 17 figures; full version (to appear in SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics) of extended abstract that appears in Proceeedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2017), pp. 1951-196