Edge coloring of graphs, uses, limitation, complexity

The known fact that coloring of the nodes of a graph improves the performance of practical clique search algorithm is the main motivation of this paper. We will describe a number of ways in which an edge coloring scheme proposed in [8] can be used in clique search. The edge coloring provides an upper bound for the clique number. This estimate has a limitation. It will be shown that the gap between the clique number and the upper bound can be arbitrarily large. Finally, it will be shown that to determine the optimal number of colors in an edge coloring is NP-hard.