Edge-colouring of graphs and hereditary graph properties

Edge-colourings of graphs have been studied for decades. We study edge-colourings with respect to hereditary graph properties. For a graph G, a hereditary graph property P and l ? 1 we define \(X{'_{P,l}}\)(G) to be the minimum number of colours needed to properly colour the edges of G, such that any subgraph of G induced by edges coloured by (at most) l colours is in P. We present a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of \(X{'_{P,l}}\)(G). We focus on edge-colourings of graphs with respect to the hereditary properties O_k and S_k, where O_k contains all graphs whose components have order at most k+1, and S_k contains all graphs of maximum degree at most k. We determine the value of \(X{'_{{S_k},l}}(G)\) for any graph G, k ? 1, l ? 1, and we present a number of results on \(X{'_{{O_k},l}}(G)\).