Confluent Drawings: Visualizing Non-planar Diagrams in a Planar Way

Authors

  • Matthew Dickerson
  • David Eppstein
  • Michael Goodrich
  • Jeremy Meng

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7155/jgaa.00099

Abstract

We introduce a new approach for drawing diagrams. Our approach is to use a technique we call confluent drawing for visualizing non-planar graphs in a planar way. This approach allows us to draw, in a crossing-free manner, graphs-such as software interaction diagrams-that would normally have many crossings. The main idea of this approach is quite simple: we allow groups of edges to be merged together and drawn as "tracks" (similar to train tracks). Producing such confluent drawings automatically from a graph with many crossings is quite challenging, however, we offer a heuristic algorithm (one version for undirected graphs and one version for directed ones) to test if a non-planar graph can be drawn efficiently in a confluent way. In addition, we identify several large classes of graphs that can be completely categorized as being either confluently drawable or confluently non-drawable.

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Published

2005-01-01

How to Cite

Dickerson, M., Eppstein, D., Goodrich, M., & Meng, J. (2005). Confluent Drawings: Visualizing Non-planar Diagrams in a Planar Way. Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications, 9(1), 31–52. https://doi.org/10.7155/jgaa.00099