Abstract: | The r‐acyclic edge chromatic number of a graph is defined to be the minimum number of colors required to produce an edge coloring of the graph such that adjacent edges receive different colors and every cycle C has at least min(|C|, r) colors. We show that (r ? 2)d is asymptotically almost surely (a.a.s.) an upper bound on the r‐acyclic edge chromatic number of a random d‐regular graph, for all constants r ≥ 4 and d ≥ 2. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 53: 101–125, 2006 |