Approximation of 3-Edge-Coloring of Cubic Graphs

The problem to find a 4-edge-coloring of a 3-regular graph is solvable in polynomial time but an analogous problem for 3-edge-coloring is NP-hard. We study complexity of approximation algorithms for invariants measuring how far is a 3-regular graph from having a 3-edge-coloring. We prove that it is an NP-hard problem to approximate such invariants by a power function with exponent smaller than 1.