English

Interval non-edge-colorable bipartite graphs and multigraphs

Combinatorics 2013-01-21 v2 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

An edge-coloring of a graph GG with colors 1,...,t1,...,t is called an interval tt-coloring if all colors are used, and the colors of edges incident to any vertex of GG are distinct and form an interval of integers. In 1991 Erd\H{o}s constructed a bipartite graph with 27 vertices and maximum degree 13 which has no interval coloring. Erd\H{o}s's counterexample is the smallest (in a sense of maximum degree) known bipartite graph which is not interval colorable. On the other hand, in 1992 Hansen showed that all bipartite graphs with maximum degree at most 3 have an interval coloring. In this paper we give some methods for constructing of interval non-edge-colorable bipartite graphs. In particular, by these methods, we construct three bipartite graphs which have no interval coloring, contain 20,19,21 vertices and have maximum degree 11,12,13, respectively. This partially answers a question that arose in [T.R. Jensen, B. Toft, Graph coloring problems, Wiley Interscience Series in Discrete Mathematics and Optimization, 1995, p. 204]. We also consider similar problems for bipartite multigraphs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1301.3811,
  title  = {Interval non-edge-colorable bipartite graphs and multigraphs},
  author = {Petros A. Petrosyan and Hrant H. Khachatrian},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.3811},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

18 pages, 7 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T23:10:37.990Z