We study the algorithmic problem of computing drawings of graphs in which $(i)$ each vertex is a disk with fixed radius $ρ$, $(ii)$ each edge is a straight-line segment connecting the centers of the two disks representing its end-vertices, $(iii)$ no two disks intersect, and $(iv)$ the distance between an edge segment and the center of a non-incident disk, called \emph{edge-vertex resolution}, is at least $ρ$. We call such drawings \emph{disk-link drawings}.
In this paper we focus on the case of constant edge-vertex resolution, namely $ρ=\frac{1}{2}$ (i.e., disks of unit diameter). We prove that star graphs, which trivially admit straight-line drawings in linear area, require quadratic area in any such disk-link drawing. On the positive side, we present constructive techniques that yield improved upper bounds for the area requirements of disk-link drawings for several (planar and nonplanar) graph classes, including bounded bandwidth, complete, and planar graphs. In particular, the presented bounds for complete and planar graphs are asymptotically tight.
We initiate the study of the vertex-ply of straight-line drawings, as a relaxation of the recently introduced ply number. Consider the disks centered at each vertex with radius equal to half the length of the longest edge incident to the vertex. The vertex-ply of a drawing is determined by the vertex covered by the maximum number of disks. The main motivation for considering this relaxation is to relate the concept of ply to proximity drawings. In fact, if we interpret the set of disks as proximity regions, a drawing with vertex-ply number 1 can be seen as a weak proximity drawing, which we ca…
We continue the study of the area requirement of convex straight-line grid drawings of 3-connected plane graphs, which has been intensively investigated in the last decades. Motivated by applications, such as graph editors, we additionally require the obtained drawings to have bounded edge-vertex resolution, that is, the closest distance between a vertex and any non-incident edge is lower bounded by a constant that does not depend on the size of the graph. We present a drawing algorithm that takes as input a 3-connected plane graph with n vertices and f internal faces and computes a convex str…
Let $G$ be a planar $3$-graph (i.e., a planar graph with vertex degree at most three) with $n$ vertices. We present the first $O(n^2)$-time algorithm that computes a planar orthogonal drawing of $G$ with the minimum number of bends in the variable embedding setting. If either a distinguished edge or a distinguished vertex of $G$ is constrained to be on the external face, a bend-minimum orthogonal drawing of $G$ that respects this constraint can be computed in $O(n)$ time. Different from previous approaches, our algorithm does not use minimum cost flow models and computes drawings where every e…
A weak dominance drawing $Γ$ of a DAG $G=(V,E)$, is a $d$-dimensional drawing such that there is a directed path from a vertex $u$ to a vertex $v$ in $G$ if $D(u) <D(v)$ for every dimension $D$ of $Γ$. We have a \emph{falsely implied path (fip)} when $D(u) < D(v)$ for every dimension $D$ of~$Γ$, but there is no path from $u$ to $v$. Minimizing the number of fips is an important theoretical and practical problem, which is NP-hard. We show that it is an FPT~problem for parameter $k$, where $k$ is the maximum degree of a vertex of the \emph{modular~decomposition~tree} of~$G$. Namely, for any cons…
It is well-known that both the pathwidth and the outer-planarity of a graph can be used to obtain lower bounds on the height of a planar straight-line drawing of a graph. But both bounds fall short for some graphs. In this paper, we consider two other parameters, the (simple) homotopy height and the (simple) grid-major height. We discuss the relationship between them and to the other parameters, and argue that they give lower bounds on the straight-line drawing height that are never worse than the ones obtained from pathwidth and outer-planarity.
In this paper we study planar morphs between straight-line planar grid drawings of trees. A morph consists of a sequence of morphing steps, where in a morphing step vertices move along straight-line trajectories at constant speed. We show how to construct planar morphs that simultaneously achieve a reduced number of morphing steps and a polynomially-bounded resolution. We assume that both the initial and final drawings lie on the grid and we ensure that each morphing step produces a grid drawing; further, we consider both upward drawings of rooted trees and drawings of arbitrary trees.
A k-bend right-angle-crossing drawing or (k-bend RAC drawing}, for short) of a graph is a polyline drawing where each edge has at most k bends and the angles formed at the crossing points of the edges are 90 degrees. Accordingly, a graph that admits a k-bend RAC drawing is referred to as k-bend right-angle-crossing graph (or k-bend RAC, for short). In this paper, we continue the study of the maximum edge-density of 1-bend RAC graphs. We show that an n-vertex 1-bend RAC graph cannot have more than $5.5n-O(1)$ edges. We also demonstrate that there exist infinitely many n-vertex 1-bend RAC graphs…
An orientation of a grid is called unique sink orientation (USO) if each of its nonempty subgrids has a unique sink. Particularly, the original grid itself has a unique global sink. In this work we investigate the problem of how to find the global sink using minimum number of queries to an oracle. There are two different oracle models: the vertex query model where the orientation of all edges incident to the queried vertex are provided, and the edge query model where the orientation of the queried edge is provided. In the 2-dimensional case, we design an optimal linear deterministic algorithm …
In this paper we study the area requirements of planar greedy drawings of triconnected planar graphs. Cao, Strelzoff, and Sun exhibited a family $\cal H$ of subdivisions of triconnected plane graphs and claimed that every planar greedy drawing of the graphs in $\mathcal H$ respecting the prescribed plane embedding requires exponential area. However, we show that every $n$-vertex graph in $\cal H$ actually has a planar greedy drawing respecting the prescribed plane embedding on an $O(n)\times O(n)$ grid. This reopens the question whether triconnected planar graphs admit planar greedy drawings o…
Graph drawing with spring embedders employs a V x V computation phase over the graph's vertex set to compute repulsive forces. Here, the efficacy of forces diminishes with distance: a vertex can effectively only influence other vertices in a certain radius around its position. Therefore, the algorithm lends itself to an implementation using search data structures to reduce the runtime complexity. NVIDIA RT cores implement hierarchical tree traversal in hardware. We show how to map the problem of finding graph layouts with force-directed methods to a ray tracing problem that can subsequently be…
In this paper we study the computational complexity of the Upward Planarity Extension problem, which takes in input an upward planar drawing $Γ_H$ of a subgraph $H$ of a directed graph $G$ and asks whether $Γ_H$ can be extended to an upward planar drawing of $G$. Our study fits into the line of research on the extensibility of partial representations, which has recently become a mainstream in Graph Drawing. We show the following results. First, we prove that the Upward Planarity Extension problem is NP-complete, even if $G$ has a prescribed upward embedding, the vertex set of $H$ coincides wit…
We consider the recently introduced model of \emph{low ply graph drawing}, in which the ply-disks of the vertices do not have many common overlaps, which results in a good distribution of the vertices in the plane. The \emph{ply-disk} of a vertex in a straight-line drawing is the disk centered at it whose radius is half the length of its longest incident edge. The largest number of ply-disks having a common overlap is called the \emph{ply-number} of the drawing. We focus on trees. We first consider drawings of trees with constant ply-number, proving that they may require exponential area, even…
In this paper we study a family of algorithms, introduced by Chan [SODA 1999] and called LR-algorithms, for drawing ordered rooted binary trees. In particular, we are interested in constructing LR-drawings (that are drawings obtained via LR-algorithms) with small width. Chan showed three different LR-algorithms that achieve, for an ordered rooted binary tree with $n$ nodes, width $O(n^{0.695})$, width $O(n^{0.5})$, and width $O(n^{0.48})$. We prove that, for every $n$-node ordered rooted binary tree, an LR-drawing with minimum width can be constructed in $O(n^{1.48})$ time. Further, we show an…
A planar orthogonal drawing of a planar 4-graph G (i.e., a planar graph with vertex-degree at most four) is a crossing-free drawing that maps each vertex of G to a distinct point of the plane and each edge of $G$ to a sequence of horizontal and vertical segments between its end-points. A longstanding open question in Graph Drawing, dating back over 30 years, is whether there exists a linear-time algorithm to compute an orthogonal drawing of a plane 4-graph with the minimum number of bends. The term "plane" indicates that the input graph comes together with a planar embedding, which must be pre…
We consider drawings of graphs in the plane in which vertices are assigned distinct points in the plane and edges are drawn as simple curves connecting the vertices and such that the edges intersect only at their common endpoints. There is an intuitive quality measure for drawings of a graph that measures the height of a drawing $ϕ: G \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^2$ as follows. For a vertical line $\ell$ in $\mathbb{R}^2$, let the height of $\ell$ be the cardinality of the set $\ell \cap ϕ(G)$. The height of a drawing of $G$ is the maximum height over all vertical lines. In this paper, instead of ab…
Given a straight-line drawing $Γ$ of a graph $G=(V,E)$, for every vertex $v$ the ply disk $D_v$ is defined as a disk centered at $v$ where the radius of the disk is half the length of the longest edge incident to $v$. The ply number of a given drawing is defined as the maximum number of overlapping disks at some point in $\mathbb{R}^2$. Here we present a tool to explore and evaluate the ply number for graphs with instant visual feedback for the user. We evaluate our methods in comparison to an existing ply computation by De Luca et al. [WALCOM'17]. We are able to reduce the computation time fr…
In a graph story the vertices enter a graph one at a time and each vertex persists in the graph for a fixed amount of time $ω$, called viewing window. At any time, the user can see only the drawing of the graph induced by the vertices in the viewing window and this determines a sequence of drawings. For readability, we require that all the drawings of the sequence are planar. For preserving the user's mental map we require that when a vertex or an edge is drawn, it has the same drawing for its entire life. We study the problem of drawing the entire sequence by mapping the vertices only to $ω+k…
Let $G=(V, E)$ be a planar graph and let $\mathcal{C}$ be a partition of $V$. We refer to the graphs induced by the vertex sets in $\mathcal{C}$ as Clusters. Let $D_{\mathcal C}$ be an arrangement of disks with a bijection between the disks and the clusters. Akitaya et al. give an algorithm to test whether $(G, \mathcal{C})$ can be embedded onto $D_{\mathcal C}$ with the additional constraint that edges are routed through a set of pipes between the disks. Based on such an embedding, we prove that every clustered graph and every disk arrangement without pipe-disk intersections has a planar stra…
Suppose each vertex of a graph is originally occupied by contamination, except for those vertices occupied by lions. As the lions wander on the graph, they clear the contamination from each vertex they visit. However, the contamination simultaneously spreads to any adjacent vertex not occupied by a lion. How many lions are required in order to clear the graph of contamination? We give a lower bound on the number of lions needed in terms of the Cheeger constant of the graph. Furthermore, the lion and contamination problem has been studied in detail on square grid graphs by Brass et al. and Berg…
An ortho-polygon visibility representation $Γ$ of a $1$-plane graph $G$ (OPVR of $G$) is an embedding preserving drawing that maps each vertex of $G$ to a distinct orthogonal polygon and each edge of $G$ to a vertical or horizontal visibility between its end-vertices. The representation $Γ$ has vertex complexity $k$ if every polygon of $Γ$ has at most $k$ reflex corners. It is known that $3$-connected $1$-plane graphs admit an OPVR with vertex complexity at most twelve, while vertex complexity at least two may be required in some cases. In this paper, we reduce this gap by showing that vertex …
同一图形的两个直线平面图之间的变形是从第一个图到第二个图的连续变换，使得平面性始终保持不变。变形的每一步都沿直线以恒定速度移动每个顶点。尽管在几十年前就已经确定了任何两个图形之间存在变形，但直到最近才证明多项式数量的步骤足以使任何两个平面直线图形变形。也就是说，在SODA 2013年，Alamdari et al. [1]证明了平面图的任意两个平面直线图都可以在O（n^4）步内变形，而如果我们限制为极大平面图，则O（n^2）步就足够了。本文改进了这一结果，给出了一个O（n^2）步变形平面图的任意两个平面直线图的算法，并进一步证明了串-并联图的任意两个平面直线图之间存在一个O（n）步变形.
We study the problem of drawing a dynamic graph, where each vertex appears in the graph at a certain time and remains in the graph for a fixed amount of time, called the window size. This defines a graph story, i.e., a sequence of subgraphs, each induced by the vertices that are in the graph at the same time. The drawing of a graph story is a sequence of drawings of such subgraphs. To support readability, we require that each drawing is straight-line and planar and that each vertex maintains its placement in all the drawings. Ideally, the area of the drawing of each subgraph should be a functi…
Ortho-Radial drawings are a generalization of orthogonal drawings to grids that are formed by concentric circles and straight-line spokes emanating from the circles' center. Such drawings have applications in schematic graph layouts, e.g., for metro maps and destination maps. A plane graph is a planar graph with a fixed planar embedding. We give a combinatorial characterization of the plane graphs that admit a planar ortho-radial drawing without bends. Previously, such a characterization was only known for paths, cycles, and theta graphs, and in the special case of rectangular drawings for cub…
Given an undirected simple graph, a subset of the vertices of the graph is a {\em dominating set} if every vertex not in the subset is adjacent to at least one vertex in the subset. A subset of the vertices of the graph is a {\em connected dominating set} if the subset is a dominating set and the subgraph induced by the subset is connected. In this paper, we determine the minimum cardinality of a connected dominating set, called the {\em connected domination number}, of an $m \times n$ grid graph for any $m$ and $n$.
In a planar L-drawing of a directed graph (digraph) each edge e is represented as a polyline composed of a vertical segment starting at the tail of e and a horizontal segment ending at the head of e. Distinct edges may overlap, but not cross. Our main focus is on bimodal graphs, i.e., digraphs admitting a planar embedding in which the incoming and outgoing edges around each vertex are contiguous. We show that every plane bimodal graph without 2-cycles admits a planar L-drawing. This includes the class of upward-plane graphs. Finally, outerplanar digraphs admit a planar L-drawing - although the…
The crossing angle of a straight-line drawing $Γ$ of a graph $G=(V, E)$ is the smallest angle between two crossing edges in $Γ$. Deciding whether a graph $G$ has a straight-line drawing with a crossing angle of $90^\circ$ is $\mathcal NP$-hard. We propose a simple heuristic to compute a drawing with a large crossing angle. The heuristic greedily selects the best position for a single vertex in a random set of points. The algorithm is accompanied by a speed-up technique to compute the crossing angle of a straight-line drawing. We show the effectiveness of the heuristic in an extensive empirical…
Finding Hamitonian Cycles in square grid graphs is a well studied and important questions. More recent work has extended these results to triangular and hexagonal grids, as well as further restricted versions. In this paper, we examine a class of more complex grids, as well as looking at the problem with restricted types of paths. We investigate the hardness of Hamiltonian cycle problem in grid graphs of semiregular tessellations. We give NP-hardness reductions for finding Hamiltonian paths in grid graphs based on all eight of the semiregular tessilations. Next, we investigate variations on th…
We prove that, given two topologically-equivalent upward planar straight-line drawings of an $n$-vertex directed graph $G$, there always exists a morph between them such that all the intermediate drawings of the morph are upward planar and straight-line. Such a morph consists of $O(1)$ morphing steps if $G$ is a reduced planar $st$-graph, $O(n)$ morphing steps if $G$ is a planar $st$-graph, $O(n)$ morphing steps if $G$ is a reduced upward planar graph, and $O(n^2)$ morphing steps if $G$ is a general upward planar graph. Further, we show that $Ω(n)$ morphing steps might be necessary for an upwa…
In this work we consider balanced Schnyder woods for planar graphs, which are Schnyder woods where the number of incoming edges of each color at each vertex is balanced as much as possible. We provide a simple linear-time heuristic leading to obtain well balanced Schnyder woods in practice. As test applications we consider two important algorithmic problems: the computation of Schnyder drawings and of small cycle separators. While not being able to provide theoretical guarantees, our experimental results (on a wide collection of planar graphs) suggest that the use of balanced Schnyder woods le…
Given a graph $G = (V,E)$ with vertex weights $w(v)$ and a desired number of parts $k$, the goal in graph partitioning problems is to partition the vertex set V into parts $V_1,\ldots,V_k$. Metrics for compactness, contiguity, and balance of the parts $V_i$ are frequent objectives, with much existing literature focusing on compactness and balance. Revisiting an old method known as striping, we give the first polynomial-time algorithms with guaranteed contiguity and provable bicriteria approximations for compactness and balance for planar grid graphs. We consider several types of graph partitio…
