Hardness results for rainbow disconnection of graphs

Let $G$ be a nontrivial connected, edge-colored graph. An edge-cut $S$ of $G$ is called a rainbow cut if no two edges in $S$ are colored with a same color. An edge-coloring of $G$ is a rainbow disconnection coloring if for every two distinct vertices $s$ and $t$ of $G$, there exists a rainbow cut $S$ in $G$ such that $s$ and $t$ belong to different components of $G\setminus S$. For a connected graph $G$, the {\it rainbow disconnection number} of $G$, denoted by $rd(G)$, is defined as the smallest number of colors such that $G$ has a rainbow disconnection coloring by using this number of colors. In this paper, we show that for a connected graph $G$, computing $rd(G)$ is NP-hard. In particular, it is already NP-complete to decide if $rd(G)=3$ for a connected cubic graph. Moreover, we prove that for a given edge-colored (with an unbounded number of colors) connected graph $G$ it is NP-complete to decide whether $G$ is rainbow disconnected.Comment: 8 pages. In the second version we made some correction for the proof of our main Lemma 2.

Proper disconnection of graphs

For an edge-colored graph $G$, a set $F$ of edges of $G$ is called a \emph{proper cut} if $F$ is an edge-cut of $G$ and any pair of adjacent edges in $F$ are assigned by different colors. An edge-colored graph is \emph{proper disconnected} if for each pair of distinct vertices of $G$ there exists a proper edge-cut separating them. For a connected graph $G$, the \emph{proper disconnection number} of $G$, denoted by $pd(G)$, is the minimum number of colors that are needed in order to make $G$ proper disconnected. In this paper, we first give the exact values of the proper disconnection numbers for some special families of graphs. Next, we obtain a sharp upper bound of $pd(G)$ for a connected graph $G$ of order $n$, i.e, $pd(G)\leq \min\{ \chi'(G)-1, \left \lceil \frac{n}{2} \right \rceil\}$. Finally, we show that for given integers $k$ and $n$, the minimum size of a connected graph $G$ of order $n$ with $pd(G)=k$ is $n-1$ for $k=1$ and $n+2k-4$ for $2\leq k\leq \lceil\frac{n}{2}\rceil$.Comment: 14 page