Multi-color forcing in graphs

Chassidy Bozeman, Pamela E. Harris, Neel Jain, Ben Young, Teresa Yu

Published 2019-12-04Version 1

Let $G=(V,E)$ be a finite connected graph along with a coloring of the vertices of $G$ using the colors in a given set $X$. In this paper, we introduce multi-color forcing, a generalization of zero-forcing on graphs, and give conditions in which the multi-color forcing process terminates regardless of the number of colors used. We give an upper bound on the number of steps required to terminate a forcing procedure in terms of the number of vertices in the graph on which the procedure is being applied. We then focus on multi-color forcing with three colors and analyze the end states of certain families of graphs, including complete graphs, complete bipartite graphs, and paths, based on various initial colorings. We end with a few directions for future research.