On the computational complexity of strong edge coloring Original Research Article

In the strong edge coloring problem, the objective is to color the edges of the given graph with the minimum number of colors so that every color class is an induced matching. In this paper, we will prove that this problem is NP-complete even in a very restricted setting. Also, a closely related problem, namely the maximum antimatching problem, is studied, and some NP-completeness results and a polynomial time algorithm for a subproblem are derived.