In this paper we present an extensive experimental study comparing four general-purpose graph drawing algorithms. The four algorithms take as input general graphs (with no restrictions whatsoever on connectivity, planarity, etc.) and construct orthogonal grid drawings, which are widely used in software and database visualization applications. The test data (available by anonymous ftp) are 11,582 graphs, ranging from 10 to 100 vertices, which have been generated from a core set of 112 graphs used in "real-life" software engineering and database applications. The experiments

. We report on our experiments with five graph drawing algorithms for general undirected graphs. These are the algorithms FR introduced by Fruchterman and Reingold [5], KK by Kamada and Kawai [11], DH by Davidson and Harel [1], Tu by Tunkelang [13] and GEM by Frick, Ludwig and Mehldau [6]. Implementations of these algorithms have been integrated into our GraphEd system [9]. We have tested these algorithms on a wide collection of examples and with different settings of parameters. Our examples are from original papers and by our own. The obtained drawings are evaluated both empirically and by GraphEd's evaluation toolkit. As a conclusion we can confirm the reported good behaviour of the algorithms. Combining time and quality we recommend to use GEM or KK first, then FR and Tu and finally DH. 1 Introduction Graph drawing has become an important area of research in Computer Science. There is a wide range of applications including data structures, data bases, software engineering, VLSI te...

Hierarchical structures represented by directed acyclic graphs are widely used in visualization applications (e.g., class inheritance diagrams and scheduling diagrams). 3D information visualization has received increasing attention in the last few years, motivated by the advances in hardware and software technology for 3D computer graphics.

This paper is organized as follows. In section 2, we present an overview on the GraphEd system and the implemented graph drawing algorithms. Section 3 explains our evaluation experiments, and Section 4 shows our results. In Section 5 we give a subjective ranking of layout criteria. 2 GraphEd

One of the primary prerequisites of drawing a graph directly from practical application is that the user must be able to formulate constraints for the layout. We introduce a concept to incorporate various kinds of constraints in the well-known model for bendminimizing orthogonal drawings for planar and nonplanar graphs which was originally based on a mincost-flow approach. Using ILP formulations, we drastically improve the flexibility of the basic system and enable a possibly effective user interaction while ensuring efficient algorithms. Via some examples we are able to demonstrate our realization of this concept.

We present an experimental study in which we compare the state-of-the-art methods for compacting orthogonal graph layouts. Given the shape of a planar orthogonal drawing, the task is to place the vertices and the bends on grid points so that the total area or the total edge length is minimised. We compare four constructive heuristics based on rectangular dissection and on turn-regularity, also in combination with two improvement heuristics based on longest paths and network flows, and an exact method which is able to compute provable optimal drawings of minimum total edge length. We provide a performance evaluation in terms of quality and running time. The test data consists of two test-suites already used in previous experimental research. In order to get hard instances, we randomly generated an additional set of planar graphs.

Most of the work that appears in the orthogonal graph drawing literature deals with graphs whose maximum degree is four. In this paper we present an algorithm for orthogonal drawings of simple graphs with degree higher than four. Vertices are represented by rectangular boxes of perimeter less than twice the degree of the vertex. Our algorithm is based on creating groups/pairs of vertices of the graph both ahead of time and in real drawing time. The orthogonal drawings produced by our algorithm have area at most (m -1) * (m/2 +2). Two important properties of our algorithm are that the drawings exhibit small total number of bends (less than m), and that there is at most one bend per edge.

The visualization of conceptual structures is a key component of support tools for complex applications in science and engineering. Foremost among the visual representations used are drawings of graphs and ordered sets. In this talk, we survey recent advances in the theory and practice of graph drawing. Specific topics include bounds and tradeoffs for drawing properties, three-dimensional representations, methods for constraint satisfaction, and experimental studies. 1 Introduction In this paper, we survey selected research trends in graph drawing, and overview some recent results of the author and his collaborators. Graph drawing addresses the problem of constructing geometric representations of graphs, a key component of support tools for complex applications in science and engineering. Graph drawing is a young research field that has growth very rapidly in the last decade. One of its distinctive characteristics is to have furthered collaborative efforts between computer scien...

In this paper we consider the class of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), and present the results of an experimental study on four drawing algorithms specifically developed for DAGs. Our study is conducted on two large test suites of DAGs and yields more than 30 charts comparing the performance of the drawing algorithms with respect to several quality measures, including area, crossings, bends, and aspect ratio. The algorithms exhibit various trade-offs with respect to the quality measures, and none of them clearly outperforms the others.

Graph Drawing (also known as Graph Visualization) tackles the problem of representing graphs on a visual medium such as computer screen, printer etc. Many applications such as software engineering, data base design, project planning, VLSI design, multimedia etc., have data structures that can be represented as graphs. With the ever increasing complexity of these and new applications, and availability of hardware supporting visualization, the area of graph drawing is increasingly getting more attention from both practitioners and researchers. In a typical drawing of a graph, the vertices are represented as symbols such as circles, dots or boxes, etc., and the edges are drawn as continuous curves joining their end points. Often, the edges are simply drawn as (straight- or poly-) lines joining their end points (and hence the title of this thesis), followed by an optional transformation into smooth curves. The goal of research in graph drawing is to develop techniques for constructing good...