2,681 research outputs found
Drawing Graphs within Restricted Area
We study the problem of selecting a maximum-weight subgraph of a given graph
such that the subgraph can be drawn within a prescribed drawing area subject to
given non-uniform vertex sizes. We develop and analyze heuristics both for the
general (undirected) case and for the use case of (directed) calculation graphs
which are used to analyze the typical mistakes that high school students make
when transforming mathematical expressions in the process of calculating, for
example, sums of fractions
Drawing graphs with vertices and edges in convex position
A graph has strong convex dimension , if it admits a straight-line drawing
in the plane such that its vertices are in convex position and the midpoints of
its edges are also in convex position. Halman, Onn, and Rothblum conjectured
that graphs of strong convex dimension are planar and therefore have at
most edges. We prove that all such graphs have at most edges
while on the other hand we present a class of non-planar graphs of strong
convex dimension . We also give lower bounds on the maximum number of edges
a graph of strong convex dimension can have and discuss variants of this
graph class. We apply our results to questions about large convexly independent
sets in Minkowski sums of planar point sets, that have been of interest in
recent years.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, improved expositio
Drawing Graphs as Spanners
We study the problem of embedding graphs in the plane as good geometric
spanners. That is, for a graph , the goal is to construct a straight-line
drawing of in the plane such that, for any two vertices and
of , the ratio between the minimum length of any path from to
and the Euclidean distance between and is small. The maximum such
ratio, over all pairs of vertices of , is the spanning ratio of .
First, we show that deciding whether a graph admits a straight-line drawing
with spanning ratio , a proper straight-line drawing with spanning ratio
, and a planar straight-line drawing with spanning ratio are
NP-complete, -complete, and linear-time solvable problems,
respectively, where a drawing is proper if no two vertices overlap and no edge
overlaps a vertex.
Second, we show that moving from spanning ratio to spanning ratio
allows us to draw every graph. Namely, we prove that, for every
, every (planar) graph admits a proper (resp. planar) straight-line
drawing with spanning ratio smaller than .
Third, our drawings with spanning ratio smaller than have large
edge-length ratio, that is, the ratio between the length of the longest edge
and the length of the shortest edge is exponential. We show that this is
sometimes unavoidable. More generally, we identify having bounded toughness as
the criterion that distinguishes graphs that admit straight-line drawings with
constant spanning ratio and polynomial edge-length ratio from graphs that
require exponential edge-length ratio in any straight-line drawing with
constant spanning ratio
Drawing graphs for cartographic applications
Graph Drawing is a relatively young area that combines elements of graph theory, algorithms, (computational) geometry and (computational) topology. Research in this field concentrates on developing algorithms for drawing graphs while satisfying certain aesthetic criteria. These criteria are often expressed in properties like edge complexity, number of edge crossings, angular resolutions, shapes of faces or graph symmetries and in general aim at creating a drawing of a graph that conveys the information to the reader in the best possible way. Graph drawing has applications in a wide variety of areas which include cartography, VLSI design and information visualization. In this thesis we consider several graph drawing problems. The first problem we address is rectilinear cartogram construction. A cartogram, also known as value-by-area map, is a technique used by cartographers to visualize statistical data over a set of geographical regions like countries, states or counties. The regions of a cartogram are deformed such that the area of a region corresponds to a particular geographic variable. The shapes of the regions depend on the type of cartogram. We consider rectilinear cartograms of constant complexity, that is cartograms where each region is a rectilinear polygon with a constant number of vertices. Whether a cartogram is good is determined by how closely the cartogram resembles the original map and how precisely the area of its regions describe the associated values. The cartographic error is defined for each region as jAc¡Asj=As, where Ac is the area of the region in the cartogram and As is the specified area of that region, given by the geographic variable to be shown. In this thesis we consider the construction of rectilinear cartograms that have correct adjacencies of the regions and zero cartographic error. We show that any plane triangulated graph admits a rectilinear cartogram where every region has at most 40 vertices which can be constructed in O(nlogn) time. We also present experimental results that show that in practice the algorithm works significantly better than suggested by the complexity bounds. In our experiments on real-world data we were always able to construct a cartogram where the average number of vertices per region does not exceed five. Since a rectangle has four vertices, this means that most of the regions of our rectilinear car tograms are in fact rectangles. Moreover, the maximum number vertices of each region in these cartograms never exceeded ten. The second problem we address in this thesis concerns cased drawings of graphs. The vertices of a drawing are commonly marked with a disk, but differentiating between vertices and edge crossings in a dense graph can still be difficult. Edge casing is a wellknown method—used, for example, in electrical drawings, when depicting knots, and, more generally, in information visualization—to alleviate this problem and to improve the readability of a drawing. A cased drawing orders the edges of each crossing and interrupts the lower edge in an appropriate neighborhood of the crossing. One can also envision that every edge is encased in a strip of the background color and that the casing of the upper edge covers the lower edge at the crossing. If there are no application-specific restrictions that dictate the order of the edges at each crossing, then we can in principle choose freely how to arrange them. However, certain orders will lead to a more readable drawing than others. In this thesis we formulate aesthetic criteria for a cased drawing as optimization problems and solve these problems. For most of the problems we present either a polynomial time algorithm or demonstrate that the problem is NP-hard. Finally we consider a combinatorial question in computational topology concerning three types of objects: closed curves in the plane, surfaces immersed in the plane, and surfaces embedded in space. In particular, we study casings of closed curves in the plane to decide whether these curves can be embedded as the boundaries of certain special surfaces. We show that it is NP-complete to determine whether an immersed disk is the projection of a surface embedded in space, or whether a curve is the boundary of an immersed surface in the plane that is not constrained to be a disk. However, when a casing is supplied with a self-intersecting curve, describing which component of the curve lies above and which below at each crossing, we can determine in time linear in the number of crossings whether the cased curve forms the projected boundary of a surface in space. As a related result, we show that an immersed surface with a single boundary curve that crosses itself n times has at most 2n=2 combinatorially distinct spatial embeddings and we discuss the existence of fixed-parameter tractable algorithms for related problems
The Complexity of Drawing Graphs on Few Lines and Few Planes
It is well known that any graph admits a crossing-free straight-line drawing
in and that any planar graph admits the same even in
. For a graph and , let denote
the minimum number of lines in that together can cover all edges
of a drawing of . For , must be planar. We investigate the
complexity of computing these parameters and obtain the following hardness and
algorithmic results.
- For , we prove that deciding whether for a
given graph and integer is -complete.
- Since , deciding is NP-hard for . On the positive side, we show that the problem
is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to .
- Since , both and
are computable in polynomial space. On the negative side, we show
that drawings that are optimal with respect to or
sometimes require irrational coordinates.
- Let be the minimum number of planes in needed
to cover a straight-line drawing of a graph . We prove that deciding whether
is NP-hard for any fixed . Hence, the problem is
not fixed-parameter tractable with respect to unless
- …