Stress-Minimizing Orthogonal Layout of Data Flow Diagrams with Ports

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel stress-minimization approach for orthogonal data flow diagram layouts with ports, improving global structure visualization and compactness over layered methods.

Contribution

It extends constrained stress majorization to handle ports and flow layout, offering a new method for more symmetric and space-efficient diagrams.

Findings

Layouts exhibit better symmetry and compactness.

Reduced inter-layer whitespace compared to layered approaches.

Improved global structure visualization.

Abstract

We present a fundamentally different approach to orthogonal layout of data flow diagrams with ports. This is based on extending constrained stress majorization to cater for ports and flow layout. Because we are minimizing stress we are able to better display global structure, as measured by several criteria such as stress, edge-length variance, and aspect ratio. Compared to the layered approach, our layouts tend to exhibit symmetries, and eliminate inter-layer whitespace, making the diagrams more compact.