Perfect Matching Covers of Cubic Graphs of Oddness 2

Abstract

A perfect matching cover of a graph $G$ is a set of perfect matchings of $G$ such that each edge of $G$ is contained in at least one member of it. Berge conjectured that every bridgeless cubic graph has a perfect matching cover of order at most 5. The Berge Conjecture is largely open and it is even unknown whether a constant integer $c$ does exist such that every bridgeless cubic graph has a perfect matching cover of order at most $c$. In this paper, we show that a bridgeless cubic graph $G$ has a perfect matching cover of order at most 11 if $G$ has a 2-factor in which the number of odd circuits is 2.