Planar graphs with maximum degree 4 are strongly 19-edge-colorable

Abstract A strong edge-coloring of a graph is a proper edge-coloring such that edges at distance at most 2 receive different colors. It is known that every planar graph has a strong edge-coloring by using at most 4 Δ + 4 colors, where Δ denotes the maximum degree of the graph. In this paper, we will show that 19 colors are enough to color a planar graph with maximum degree 4.