Generalized vertex-colorings of partial k-trees

Let l be a positive integer, and let G be a graph with nonnegative integer weights on edges. Then a generalized vertex-coloring, called an l-coloring of G, is an assignment of colors to the vertices of G in such a way that any two vertices u and ν get different colors if the distance between u and ν in G is at most l. In this paper we give an algorithm to find an l-coloring of a given graph G with the minimum number of colors. The algorithm takes polynomial time if G is a partial k-tree and both l and k are bounded integers.