Reducing hypergraph coloring to clique search

Abstract It is known that the legal coloring of the nodes of a given graph can be reduced to a clique search problem. This paper generalizes this result for hypergraphs. Namely, we will show how legal coloring of the nodes of a hypergraph can be reduced to clique search in a uniform hypergraph. Replacing ordinary graphs by hypergraphs extends the descriptive power of graph models. In addition searching cliques in uniform hypergraphs may improve the efficiency of computations. As an illustration we will apply the reformulation technique to a hypergraph coloring problem due to Voloshin.