An 18-colour bound for locally irregular decompositions

Abstract: A graph is locally irregular if adjacent vertices have distinct degrees. A graph G is decomposable if its edge set can be decomposed into locally irregular graphs, and its locally irregular chromatic index lir(G) is the least number of graphs in such a decomposition. We prove that lir(G) <= 18 for every decomposable graph G, improving the previous bound of 220.