On Embeddability of Buses in Point Sets

Set membership of points in the plane can be visualized by connecting corresponding points via graphical features, like paths, trees, polygons, ellipses. In this paper we study the \emph{bus embeddability problem} (BEP): given a set of colored points we ask whether there exists a planar realization with one horizontal straight-line segment per color, called bus, such that all points with the same color are connected with vertical line segments to their bus. We present an ILP and an FPT algorithm for the general problem. For restricted versions of this problem, such as when the relative order of buses is predefined, or when a bus must be placed above all its points, we provide efficient algorithms. We show that another restricted version of the problem can be solved using 2-stack pushall sorting. On the negative side we prove the NP-completeness of a special case of BEP.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures, conference version at GD 201

On Bus Graph Realizability

In this paper, we consider the following graph embedding problem: Given a bipartite graph G = (V1, V2; E), where the maximum degree of vertices in V2 is 4, can G be embedded on a two dimensional grid such that each vertex in V1 is drawn as a line segment along a grid line, each vertex in V2 is drawn as a point at a grid point, and each edge e = (u, v) for some u ∈ V1 and v ∈ V2 is drawn as a line segment connecting u and v, perpendicular to the line segment for u? We show that this problem is NP-complete, and sketch how our proof techniques can be used to show the hardness of several other related problems