Rectangular Layouts and Contact Graphs

Contact graphs of isothetic rectangles unify many concepts from applications including VLSI and architectural design, computational geometry, and GIS. Minimizing the area of their corresponding {\em rectangular layouts} is a key problem. We study the area-optimization problem and show that it is NP-hard to find a minimum-area rectangular layout of a given contact graph. We present O(n)-time algorithms that construct $O(n^2)$-area rectangular layouts for general contact graphs and $O(n\log n)$-area rectangular layouts for trees. (For trees, this is an $O(\log n)$-approximation algorithm.) We also present an infinite family of graphs (rsp., trees) that require $\Omega(n^2)$ (rsp., $\Omega(n\log n)$) area. We derive these results by presenting a new characterization of graphs that admit rectangular layouts using the related concept of {\em rectangular duals}. A corollary to our results relates the class of graphs that admit rectangular layouts to {\em rectangle of influence drawings}.Comment: 28 pages, 13 figures, 55 references, 1 appendi

Transversal structures on triangulations: a combinatorial study and straight-line drawings

This article focuses on a combinatorial structure specific to triangulated plane graphs with quadrangular outer face and no separating triangle, which are called irreducible triangulations. The structure has been introduced by Xin He under the name of regular edge-labelling and consists of two bipolar orientations that are transversal. For this reason, the terminology used here is that of transversal structures. The main results obtained in the article are a bijection between irreducible triangulations and ternary trees, and a straight-line drawing algorithm for irreducible triangulations. For a random irreducible triangulation with $n$ vertices, the grid size of the drawing is asymptotically with high probability $11n/27\times 11n/27$ up to an additive error of \cO(\sqrt{n}). In contrast, the best previously known algorithm for these triangulations only guarantees a grid size $(\lceil n/2\rceil -1)\times \lfloor n/2\rfloor$.Comment: 42 pages, the second version is shorter, focusing on the bijection (with application to counting) and on the graph drawing algorithm. The title has been slightly change

Improved Algorithms for the Point-Set Embeddability problem for Plane 3-Trees

In the point set embeddability problem, we are given a plane graph $G$ with $n$ vertices and a point set $S$ with $n$ points. Now the goal is to answer the question whether there exists a straight-line drawing of $G$ such that each vertex is represented as a distinct point of $S$ as well as to provide an embedding if one does exist. Recently, in \cite{DBLP:conf/gd/NishatMR10}, a complete characterization for this problem on a special class of graphs known as the plane 3-trees was presented along with an efficient algorithm to solve the problem. In this paper, we use the same characterization to devise an improved algorithm for the same problem. Much of the efficiency we achieve comes from clever uses of the triangular range search technique. We also study a generalized version of the problem and present improved algorithms for this version of the problem as well

On Vertex- and Empty-Ply Proximity Drawings

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 call empty-ply drawing. We show non-trivial relationships between the ply number and the vertex-ply number. Then, we focus on empty-ply drawings, proving some properties and studying what classes of graphs admit such drawings. Finally, we prove a lower bound on the ply and the vertex-ply of planar drawings.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017