Acyclic improper colorings of graphs

In this article, we introduce the new notion of acyclic improper colorings of graphs. An improper coloring of a graph is a vertex-coloring in which adjacent vertices are allowed to have the same color, but each color class V-i satisfies some condition depending on i. Such a coloring is acyclic if there are no alternating 2-colored cycles. We prove that every outerplanar graph can be acyclically 2-colored in such a way that each monochromatic subgraph has degree at most five and that this result is best possible. For planar graphs, we prove some negative results and state some open problems. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.