A flow based pruning scheme for enumerative equitable coloring algorithms

An equitable graph coloring is a proper vertex coloring, such that the size of the color classes differ by at most one. We present a flow-based scheme for generating pruning rules for enumerative algorithms such as DSATUR. The scheme models the extendability of a partial (equitable) coloring into an equitable coloring via network flows. Computational experiments show that significant reductions of the search tree can be achieved by the derived pruning rules.