Kaiser and Raspaud conjecture on cubic Graphs with few vertices

If $G$ is a bridgeless cubic graph, Fulkerson conjectured that we can find $6$ perfect matchings $M_1,\ldots,M_6$ of $G$ with the property that every edge of $G$ is contained in exactly two of them and Berge conjectured that its edge set can be covered by $5$ perfect matchings. We define $\tau(G)$ as the least number of perfect matchings allowing to cover the edge set of a bridgeless cubic graph and we study this parameter. The set of graphs with perfect matching index $4$ seems interesting and we give some informations on this class.

[1]  Jean-Marie Vanherpe,et al.  On Fan Raspaud Conjecture , 2008, ArXiv.

[2]  J. A. Bondy,et al.  Graph Theory with Applications , 1978 .

[3]  Daniel Král,et al.  Unions of perfect matchings in cubic graphs , 2005, Electron. Notes Discret. Math..

[4]  D. R. Fulkerson,et al.  Blocking and anti-blocking pairs of polyhedra , 1971, Math. Program..

[5]  André Raspaud,et al.  Fulkerson's Conjecture and Circuit Covers , 1994, J. Comb. Theory, Ser. B.