Hardness results for rainbow disconnection of graphs

Abstract: Let $G$ be a nontrivial connected, edge-colored graph. An edge-cut $S$ of $G$ is called a rainbow cut if no two edges in $S$ are colored with a same color. An edge-coloring of $G$ is a rainbow disconnection coloring if for every two distinct vertices $s$ and $t$ of $G$, there exists a rainbow cut $S$ in $G$ such that $s$ and $t$ belong to different components of $G\setminus S$. For a connected graph $G$, the {\it rainbow disconnection number} of $G$, denoted by $rd(G)$, is defined as the smallest number of colors such that $G$ has a rainbow disconnection coloring by using this number of colors. In this paper, we show that for a connected graph $G$, computing $rd(G)$ is NP-hard. In particular, it is already NP-complete to decide if $rd(G)=3$ for a connected cubic graph. Moreover, we prove that for a given edge-colored (with an unbounded number of colors) connected graph $G$ it is NP-complete to decide whether $G$ is rainbow disconnected.