An Interactive Tool to Explore and Improve the Ply Number of Drawings

TL;DR

This paper introduces an interactive tool that efficiently computes and visualizes the ply number of graph drawings, enabling users to explore and optimize graph layouts with instant feedback.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel interactive tool that significantly reduces ply computation time and integrates automatic features for ply reduction, enhancing graph visualization analysis.

Findings

Computation time reduced from seconds to milliseconds.

The tool provides instant visual feedback for ply evaluation.

Automatic features help in reducing the ply number.

Abstract

Given a straight-line drawing $\Gamma$ of a graph $G=(V,E)$, for every vertex $v$ the ply disk $D_v$ is defined as a disk centered at $v$ where the radius of the disk is half the length of the longest edge incident to $v$. The ply number of a given drawing is defined as the maximum number of overlapping disks at some point in $\mathbb{R}^2$. Here we present a tool to explore and evaluate the ply number for graphs with instant visual feedback for the user. We evaluate our methods in comparison to an existing ply computation by De Luca et al. [WALCOM'17]. We are able to reduce the computation time from seconds to milliseconds for given drawings and thereby contribute to further research on the ply topic by providing an efficient tool to examine graphs extensively by user interaction as well as some automatic features to reduce the ply number.