Circuit decompositions and shortest circuit coverings of hypergraphs (Q1743689)

It is one of fundamental theorems in graph theory that every even graph has a circuit decomposition. This classical result for ordinary graphs is extended in this paper for uniform bridgeless hypergraphs if the degree of every vertex is even. One of the major open problems for the shortest circuit cover was a conjecture proposed by \textit{A. Itai} and \textit{M. Rodeh} [Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 62, 289--299 (1978; Zbl 0386.05047)] that every bridgeless graph \(G=(V,E)\) has a circuit cover of total length at most \(|E|+|V|-1\). This conjecture was solved by \textit{E. G. Fan} and \textit{H. Q. Zhang} [Acta Phys. Sin. 47, No. 3, 353--362 (1998; Zbl 1202.35187)] for ordinary graphs. In this paper, the authors extend this result for bridgeless hypergraphs. They prove that if \(\mathcal{H} = (\mathcal{V}, \mathcal{E})\) is a bridgeless hypergraph, then \(\mathcal{H}\) has a circuit cover with total length at most \(|\mathcal{E}|+|\mathcal{V}|-1\).