Optimal Orthogonal Graph Drawing with Convex Bend Costs

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient method for optimizing orthogonal graph drawings with convex bend costs, allowing flexible and cost-effective edge bend configurations across all planar embeddings.

Contribution

It presents a polynomial-time algorithm for the NP-hard problem of optimal orthogonal graph drawing with convex bend costs, under specific conditions, and characterizes the structure of optimal solutions.

Findings

Efficient algorithms for convex bend cost functions

Existence of solutions with at most three bends per edge

Optimal solutions can be found in O(n T_flow(n)) time for biconnected graphs

Abstract

Traditionally, the quality of orthogonal planar drawings is quantified by either the total number of bends, or the maximum number of bends per edge. However, this neglects that in typical applications, edges have varying importance. Moreover, as bend minimization over all planar embeddings is NP-hard, most approaches focus on a fixed planar embedding. We consider the problem OptimalFlexDraw that is defined as follows. Given a planar graph G on n vertices with maximum degree 4 and for each edge e a cost function cost_e : N_0 --> R defining costs depending on the number of bends on e, compute an orthogonal drawing of G of minimum cost. Note that this optimizes over all planar embeddings of the input graphs, and the cost functions allow fine-grained control on the bends of edges. In this generality OptimalFlexDraw is NP-hard. We show that it can be solved efficiently if 1) the cost function of each edge is convex and 2) the first bend on each edge does not cause any cost (which is a condition similar to the positive flexibility for the decision problem FlexDraw). Moreover, we show the existence of an optimal solution with at most three bends per edge except for a single edge per block (maximal biconnected component) with up to four bends. For biconnected graphs we obtain a running time of O(n T_flow(n)), where T_flow(n) denotes the time necessary to compute a minimum-cost flow in a planar flow network with multiple sources and sinks. For connected graphs that are not biconnected we need an additional factor of O(n).