A note on Berge-Fulkerson coloring

The Berge–Fulkerson Conjecture states that every cubic bridgeless graph has six perfect matchings such that every edge of the graph is contained in exactly two of these perfect matchings. In this paper, a useful technical lemma is proved that a cubic graph G admits a Berge–Fulkerson coloring if and only if the graph G contains a pair of edge-disjoint matchings M1 and M2 such that (i) M1 ∪ M2 induces a 2-regular subgraph of G and (ii) the suppressed graph G \Mi, the graph obtained from G \ Mi by suppressing all degree-2-vertices, is 3edge-colorable for each i = 1, 2. This lemma is further applied in the verification of Berge–Fulkerson Conjecture for some families of non-3-edge-colorable cubic graphs (such as, Goldberg snarks, flower snarks). © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.