Towards shortest longest edges in orthogonal graph drawing

Inspired by a challenge during Graph Drawing 2010 "Find an orthogonal drawing whose longest edge is as short as possible", we investigate techniques to incorporate this goal into the "standard" topology-shape-metrics approach at moderate extra computational complexity. Experiments indicate that this project is worth pursuing

A Software System for Computing Labeled Orthogonal Drawings of Graphs

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The DFS-heuristic for orthogonal graph drawing☆☆Some of these result were published in the author's PhD thesis at Rutgers University; the author would like to thank her advisor, Prof. Endre Boros, for much helpful input. The results in Section 5 have been presented at the 8th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry, Ottawa, 1996, see [1].

AbstractIn this paper, we present a new heuristic for orthogonal graph drawings, which creates drawings by performing a depth-first search and placing the nodes in the order they are encountered. This DFS-heuristic works for graphs with arbitrarily high degrees, and particularly well for graphs with maximum degree 3. It yields drawings with at most one bend per edge, and a total number of m−n+1 bends for a graph with n nodes and m edges; this improves significantly on the best previous bound of m−2 bends

A New Approach for Visualizing UML Class Diagrams

UML diagrams have become increasingly important in the engineering and reengineering processes for software systems. Of particular interest are UML class diagrams whose purpose is to display class hierarchies (generalizations), associations, aggregations, and compositions in one picture. The combination of hierarchical and non-hierarchical relations poses a special challenge to a graph layout tool. Existing layout tools treat hierarchical and non-hierarchical relations either alike or as separate tasks in a two-phase process as in, e.g., cite{See97}. We suggest a new approach for visualizing UML class diagrams leading to a balanced mixture of the following aesthetic criteria: Crossing minimization, bend minimization, uniform direction within each class hierarchy, no nesting of one class hierarchy within another, orthogonal layout, merging of multiple inheritance edges, and good edge labelling. We have realized our approach within the graph drawing library GoVisual. Experiments show the superiority to state-of-the-art and industrial standard layouts