Stack and Queue Layouts via Layered Separators

It is known that every proper minor-closed class of graphs has bounded stack-number (a.k.a. book thickness and page number). While this includes notable graph families such as planar graphs and graphs of bounded genus, many other graph families are not closed under taking minors. For fixed $g$ and $k$, we show that every $n$-vertex graph that can be embedded on a surface of genus $g$ with at most $k$ crossings per edge has stack-number $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$; this includes $k$-planar graphs. The previously best known bound for the stack-number of these families was $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{n})$, except in the case of $1$-planar graphs. Analogous results are proved for map graphs that can be embedded on a surface of fixed genus. None of these families is closed under taking minors. The main ingredient in the proof of these results is a construction proving that $n$-vertex graphs that admit constant layered separators have $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$ stack-number.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2016

Experimental Evaluation of Book Drawing Algorithms

A $k$-page book drawing of a graph $G=(V,E)$ consists of a linear ordering of its vertices along a spine and an assignment of each edge to one of the $k$ pages, which are half-planes bounded by the spine. In a book drawing, two edges cross if and only if they are assigned to the same page and their vertices alternate along the spine. Crossing minimization in a $k$-page book drawing is NP-hard, yet book drawings have multiple applications in visualization and beyond. Therefore several heuristic book drawing algorithms exist, but there is no broader comparative study on their relative performance. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive benchmark set of challenging graph classes for book drawing algorithms and provide an extensive experimental study of the performance of existing book drawing algorithms.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017