Simultaneous coloring of vertices and incidences of Outerplanar graphs

TL;DR

This paper investigates the $vi$-simultaneous proper coloring of outerplanar graphs, establishing that their chromatic number is either $ ext{max degree}+2$ or $ ext{max degree}+3$, advancing understanding of coloring properties in graph theory.

Contribution

It proves that the $vi$-simultaneous chromatic number for outerplanar graphs is tightly bounded between $ ext{max degree}+2$ and $ ext{max degree}+3$, providing a precise characterization.

Findings

The $vi$-simultaneous chromatic number of outerplanar graphs is at most $ ext{max degree}+3$.

The chromatic number is at least $ ext{max degree}+2$ for these graphs.

The exact value is either $ ext{max degree}+2$ or $ ext{max degree}+3$.

Abstract

A $vi$-simultaneous proper $k$-coloring of a graph $G$ is a coloring of all vertices and incidences of the graph in which any two adjacent or incident elements in the set $V(G)\cup I(G)$ receive distinct colors, where $I(G)$ is the set of incidences of $G$. The $vi$-simultaneous chromatic number, denoted by $\chi_{vi}(G)$, is the smallest integer $k$ such that $G$ has a $vi$-simultaneous proper $k$-coloring. In [M. Mozafari-Nia, M. N. Iradmusa, A note on coloring of $\frac{3}{3}$-power of subquartic graphs, Vol. 79, No.3, 2021] $vi$-simultaneous proper coloring of graphs with maximum degree $4$ is investigated and they conjectured that for any graph $G$ with maximum degree $\Delta\geq 2$, $vi$-simultaneous proper coloring of $G$ is at most $2\Delta+1$. In [M. Mozafari-Nia, M. N. Iradmusa, Simultaneous coloring of vertices and incidences of graphs, arXiv:2205.07189, 2022] the correctness of the conjecture for some classes of graphs such as $k$-degenerated graphs, cycles, forests, complete graphs, regular bipartite graphs is investigated. In this paper, we prove that the $vi$-simultaneous chromatic number of any outerplanar graph $G$ is either $\Delta+2$ or $\Delta+3$, where $\Delta$ is the maximum degree of $G$.