A study of the total coloring of graphs.

The area of total coloring is a more recent and less studied area than vertex and edge coloring, but recently, some attention has been given to the Total Coloring Conjecture, which states that each graph\u27s total chromatic number xT is no greater than its maximum degree plus two. In this dissertation, it is proved that the conjecture is satisfied by those planar graphs in which no vertex of degree 5 or 6 1ies on more than three 3-cycles. The total independence number aT is found for some families of graphs, and a relationship between that parameter and the size of a graph\u27s minimum maximal matching is discussed. For colorings with natural numbers, the total chromatic sum ST is introduced, as is total strength (oT of a graph. Tools are developed for proving that a total coloring has minimum sum, and this sum is found for some graphs including paths, cycles, complete graphs, complete bipartite graphs, full binary trees, and some hypercubes. A family of graphs is found for which no optimal total coloring maximizes the smallest color class. Lastly, the relationship between a graph\u27s total chromatic number and its total strength is explored, and some graphs are found that require more than their total chromatic number of colors to obtain a minimum sum

Sum Coloring : New upper bounds for the chromatic strength

The Minimum Sum Coloring Problem (MSCP) is derived from the Graph Coloring Problem (GCP) by associating a weight to each color. The aim of MSCP is to find a coloring solution of a graph such that the sum of color weights is minimum. MSCP has important applications in fields such as scheduling and VLSI design. We propose in this paper new upper bounds of the chromatic strength, i.e. the minimum number of colors in an optimal solution of MSCP, based on an abstraction of all possible colorings of a graph called motif. Experimental results on standard benchmarks show that our new bounds are significantly tighter than the previous bounds in general, allowing to reduce substantially the search space when solving MSCP .Comment: pre-prin