Covering a cubic graph with perfect matchings

Let G be a bridgeless cubic graph. A well-known conjecture of Berge and Fulkerson can be stated as follows: there exist five perfect matchings of G such that each edge of G is contained in at least one of them. Here, we prove that in each bridgeless cubic graph there exist five perfect matchings covering a portion of the edges at least equal to 215 231 . By a generalization of this result, we decrease the best known upper bound, expressed in terms of the size of the graph, for the number of perfect matchings needed to cover the edge-set of G .