Lower Estimate of Clique Size via Edge Coloring

Abstract

In many clique search algorithms well coloring of the nodes is employed to find an upper bound of the clique number of the given graph. In an earlier work a non-traditional edge coloring scheme was proposed to get upper bounds that are typically better than the one provided by the well coloring of the nodes. In this paper we will show that the same scheme for well coloring of the edges can be used to find lower bounds for the clique number of the given graph. In order to assess the performance of the procedure we carried out numerical experiments.