Orderly Spanning Trees with Applications

We introduce and study the {\em orderly spanning trees} of plane graphs. This algorithmic tool generalizes {\em canonical orderings}, which exist only for triconnected plane graphs. Although not every plane graph admits an orderly spanning tree, we provide an algorithm to compute an {\em orderly pair} for any connected planar graph $G$, consisting of a plane graph $H$ of $G$, and an orderly spanning tree of $H$. We also present several applications of orderly spanning trees: (1) a new constructive proof for Schnyder's Realizer Theorem, (2) the first area-optimal 2-visibility drawing of $G$, and (3) the best known encodings of $G$ with O(1)-time query support. All algorithms in this paper run in linear time.Comment: 25 pages, 7 figures, A preliminary version appeared in Proceedings of the 12th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2001), Washington D.C., USA, January 7-9, 2001, pp. 506-51

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

On Visibility Representations of Non-planar Graphs

A rectangle visibility representation (RVR) of a graph consists of an assignment of axis-aligned rectangles to vertices such that for every edge there exists a horizontal or vertical line of sight between the rectangles assigned to its endpoints. Testing whether a graph has an RVR is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we study the problem of finding an RVR under the assumption that an embedding in the plane of the input graph is fixed and we are looking for an RVR that reflects this embedding. We show that in this case the problem can be solved in polynomial time for general embedded graphs and in linear time for 1-plane graphs (i.e., embedded graphs having at most one crossing per edge). The linear time algorithm uses a precise list of forbidden configurations, which extends the set known for straight-line drawings of 1-plane graphs. These forbidden configurations can be tested for in linear time, and so in linear time we can test whether a 1-plane graph has an RVR and either compute such a representation or report a negative witness. Finally, we discuss some extensions of our study to the case when the embedding is not fixed but the RVR can have at most one crossing per edge

Grid-Obstacle Representations with Connections to Staircase Guarding

In this paper, we study grid-obstacle representations of graphs where we assign grid-points to vertices and define obstacles such that an edge exists if and only if an $xy$-monotone grid path connects the two endpoints without hitting an obstacle or another vertex. It was previously argued that all planar graphs have a grid-obstacle representation in 2D, and all graphs have a grid-obstacle representation in 3D. In this paper, we show that such constructions are possible with significantly smaller grid-size than previously achieved. Then we study the variant where vertices are not blocking, and show that then grid-obstacle representations exist for bipartite graphs. The latter has applications in so-called staircase guarding of orthogonal polygons; using our grid-obstacle representations, we show that staircase guarding is \textsc{NP}-hard in 2D.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017

The Partial Visibility Representation Extension Problem

For a graph $G$, a function $\psi$ is called a \emph{bar visibility representation} of $G$ when for each vertex $v \in V(G)$, $\psi(v)$ is a horizontal line segment (\emph{bar}) and $uv \in E(G)$ iff there is an unobstructed, vertical, $\varepsilon$-wide line of sight between $\psi(u)$ and $\psi(v)$. Graphs admitting such representations are well understood (via simple characterizations) and recognizable in linear time. For a directed graph $G$, a bar visibility representation $\psi$ of $G$, additionally, puts the bar $\psi(u)$ strictly below the bar $\psi(v)$ for each directed edge $(u,v)$ of $G$. We study a generalization of the recognition problem where a function $\psi'$ defined on a subset $V'$ of $V(G)$ is given and the question is whether there is a bar visibility representation $\psi$ of $G$ with $\psi(v) = \psi'(v)$ for every $v \in V'$. We show that for undirected graphs this problem together with closely related problems are \NP-complete, but for certain cases involving directed graphs it is solvable in polynomial time.Comment: Appears in the Proceedings of the 24th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2016