The chromatic index of simple graphs

The object of this thesis is twofold: (i) to study the structural properties of graphs which are critical with respect to edge-colourings; (ii) to apply the results obtained to the classification problem arising from Vizing's Theorem. Chapter 1 contains a historical, non-technical introduction, general graph-theoretic definitions and notation, a discussion of Vizing's Theorem as well as a survey of the main results obtained to date in Vizing's classification problem. Chapter 2 introduces the notion of criticality in the first section; the second section contains both well-known and new constructions of critical graphs which will be used in later chapters. The third and final section contains new results concerning elementary properties of critical graphs. Chapter 3 deals with uniquely-colourable graphs and their relationship to critical graphs. Chapter 4 contains results on the connectivity of critical graphs, whereas Chapter 5 deals with bounds on the number of edges of these graphs. In particular, bounds improving those given by Vizing are presented. These results are applied to problems concerning planar graphs. In Chapter 6, critical graphs of small order are discussed. All such graphs of order at most 8 are determined, while the 'critical graph conjecture’ of Beineke & Wilson and Jakobsen is shown to be true for all graphs on at most 10 vertices. The seventh and final chapter deals with circuit length properties of critical graphs. In particular, the minimal order of certain critical graphs with given girth and maximum valency is determined. Results improving Vizing’s estimate of the circumference of critical graphs are also given. The Appendix includes a computer programme which generates critical graphs from simpler ones using a constructive algorithm given in Chapter 2

The Erd\H{o}s-Rothschild problem on edge-colourings with forbidden monochromatic cliques

Let $\mathbf{k} := (k_1,\dots,k_s)$ be a sequence of natural numbers. For a graph $G$, let $F(G;\mathbf{k})$ denote the number of colourings of the edges of $G$ with colours $1,\dots,s$ such that, for every $c \in \{1,\dots,s\}$, the edges of colour $c$ contain no clique of order $k_c$. Write $F(n;\mathbf{k})$ to denote the maximum of $F(G;\mathbf{k})$ over all graphs $G$ on $n$ vertices. This problem was first considered by Erd\H{o}s and Rothschild in 1974, but it has been solved only for a very small number of non-trivial cases. We prove that, for every $\mathbf{k}$ and $n$, there is a complete multipartite graph $G$ on $n$ vertices with $F(G;\mathbf{k}) = F(n;\mathbf{k})$. Also, for every $\mathbf{k}$ we construct a finite optimisation problem whose maximum is equal to the limit of $\log_2 F(n;\mathbf{k})/{n\choose 2}$ as $n$ tends to infinity. Our final result is a stability theorem for complete multipartite graphs $G$, describing the asymptotic structure of such $G$ with $F(G;\mathbf{k}) = F(n;\mathbf{k}) \cdot 2^{o(n^2)}$ in terms of solutions to the optimisation problem.Comment: 16 pages, to appear in Math. Proc. Cambridge Phil. So

Partitioning de Bruijn Graphs into Fixed-Length Cycles for Robot Identification and Tracking

We propose a new camera-based method of robot identification, tracking and orientation estimation. The system utilises coloured lights mounted in a circle around each robot to create unique colour sequences that are observed by a camera. The number of robots that can be uniquely identified is limited by the number of colours available, $q$, the number of lights on each robot, $k$, and the number of consecutive lights the camera can see, $\ell$. For a given set of parameters, we would like to maximise the number of robots that we can use. We model this as a combinatorial problem and show that it is equivalent to finding the maximum number of disjoint $k$-cycles in the de Bruijn graph $\text{dB}(q,\ell)$. We provide several existence results that give the maximum number of cycles in $\text{dB}(q,\ell)$ in various cases. For example, we give an optimal solution when $k=q^{\ell-1}$. Another construction yields many cycles in larger de Bruijn graphs using cycles from smaller de Bruijn graphs: if $\text{dB}(q,\ell)$ can be partitioned into $k$-cycles, then $\text{dB}(q,\ell)$ can be partitioned into $tk$-cycles for any divisor $t$ of $k$. The methods used are based on finite field algebra and the combinatorics of words.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Discrete Applied Mathematic

Defective and Clustered Choosability of Sparse Graphs

An (improper) graph colouring has "defect" $d$ if each monochromatic subgraph has maximum degree at most $d$, and has "clustering" $c$ if each monochromatic component has at most $c$ vertices. This paper studies defective and clustered list-colourings for graphs with given maximum average degree. We prove that every graph with maximum average degree less than $\frac{2d+2}{d+2} k$ is $k$-choosable with defect $d$. This improves upon a similar result by Havet and Sereni [J. Graph Theory, 2006]. For clustered choosability of graphs with maximum average degree $m$, no $(1-\epsilon)m$ bound on the number of colours was previously known. The above result with $d=1$ solves this problem. It implies that every graph with maximum average degree $m$ is $\lfloor{\frac{3}{4}m+1}\rfloor$-choosable with clustering 2. This extends a result of Kopreski and Yu [Discrete Math., 2017] to the setting of choosability. We then prove two results about clustered choosability that explore the trade-off between the number of colours and the clustering. In particular, we prove that every graph with maximum average degree $m$ is $\lfloor{\frac{7}{10}m+1}\rfloor$-choosable with clustering $9$, and is $\lfloor{\frac{2}{3}m+1}\rfloor$-choosable with clustering $O(m)$. As an example, the later result implies that every biplanar graph is 8-choosable with bounded clustering. This is the best known result for the clustered version of the earth-moon problem. The results extend to the setting where we only consider the maximum average degree of subgraphs with at least some number of vertices. Several applications are presented