Planar L-Drawings of Bimodal Graphs

Abstract

In a planar L-drawing of a directed graph (digraph) each edge $e$ is represented as a polyline composed of a vertical segment starting at the tail of $e$ and a horizontal segment ending at the head of $e$. Distinct edges may overlap, but not cross. Our main focus is on bimodal graphs, i.e., digraphs admitting a planar embedding in which the incoming and outgoing edges around each vertex are contiguous. We show that every plane bimodal graph without 2-cycles admits a planar L-drawing. This includes the class of upward-plane graphs. Bimodal graphs with 2-cycles admit a planar L-drawing if the underlying undirected graph with merged 2-cycles is a planar 3-tree. Finally, outerplanar digraphs admit a planar L-drawing - although they do not always have a bimodal embedding - but not necessarily with an outerplanar embedding.