On the edge multicoloring of unicyclic graphs

A multicoloring of an edge weighted graph is an assignment of intervals to its edges so that the intervals of adjacent edges do not intersect at interior points and the length of each interval is equal to the weight of the edge. The minimum length of the union of all intervals is called an edge multichromatic number of the graph. The maximum weighted degree of a vertex (i.e., the sum of the weights of all edges incident with it) is an evident lower bound of this number. There are available the examples in which the multichromatic number is one and a half times larger than the lower bound. Also, there is a conjecture that the bound cannot exceeded by a larger factor. Here we prove this conjecture for the class of unicyclic graphs.