Minimum-width graph layering revisited

The minimum-width layering problem tackles one step of a layout pipeline to create top-down drawings of directed acyclic graphs. Thereby, it aims at keeping the overall width of the drawing small. We study layering heuristics for this problem as presented by Nikolov et al. as well as traditional layering methods with respect to the questions how close they are to the true minimal width and how well they perform in practice, especially, if a particular drawing area is prescribed. We find that when applied carefully and at the right moment the layering heuristics can, compared to traditional layering methods, produce better layerings for prescribed drawing areas and for graphs with varying node dimensions. Still, we also find that there is room for improvement