Complexity of equitable tree-coloring problems

Abstract

A $(q,t)$\emph{-tree-coloring} of a graph $G$ is a $q$-coloring of vertices of $G$ such that the subgraph induced by each color class is a forest of maximum degree at most $t.$ A $(q,\infty)$\emph{-tree-coloring} of a graph $G$ is a $q$-coloring of vertices of $G$ such that the subgraph induced by each color class is a forest. Wu, Zhang, and Li introduced the concept of \emph{equitable $(q, t)$-tree-coloring} (respectively, \emph{equitable $(q, \infty)$-tree-coloring}) which is a $(q,t)$-tree-coloring (respectively, $(q, \infty)$-tree-coloring) such that the sizes of any two color classes differ by at most one. Among other results, they obtained a sharp upper bound on the minimum $p$ such that $K_{n,n}$ has an equitable $(q, 1)$-tree-coloring for every $q\geq p.$ In this paper, we obtain a polynomial time criterion to decide if a complete bipartite graph has an equitable $(q,t)$-tree-coloring or an equitable $(q,\infty)$-tree-coloring. Nevertheless, deciding if a graph $G$ in general has an equitable $(q,t)$-tree-coloring or an equitable $(q,\infty)$-tree-coloring is NP-complete.