Constant-time dynamic (Δ+1)-coloring

We give a fully dynamic (Las-Vegas style) algorithm with constant expected amortized time per update that maintains a proper (Δ+1)-vertex coloring of a graph with maximum degree at most Δ. This improves upon the previous O(log Δ)-time algorithm by Bhattacharya et al. (SODA 2018). Our algorithm uses an approach based on assigning random ranks to vertices and does not need to maintain a hierarchical graph decomposition. We show that our result does not only have optimal running time, but is also optimal in the sense that already deciding whether a Δ-coloring exists in a dynamically changing graph with maximum degree at most Δ takes Ω(log n) time per operation.