Some Complexity Considerations on the Uniqueness of Graph Colouring
Résumé
For some well-known NP-complete problems, linked to the satisfiability of Boolean formulas and the colourability of a graph, we study the variation which consists in asking about the uniqueness of a solution.
In particular, we show that five decision problems, Unique Satisfiability (U-SAT), Unique k-Satisfiability (U-k-SAT), k ≥ 3, Unique One-in-Three Satisfiability (U-1-3-SAT), Unique k-Colouring (U-k-COL), k ≥ 3, and Unique Colouring (U-COL), have equivalent complexities, up to polynomials —when dealing with colourings, we forbid permutations of
colours. As a consequence, all are NP-hard and belong to the class DP. We also consider the problems U-2-SAT, U-2-COL and Unique Optimal Colouring (U-OCOL).