A Flow Formulation for Horizontal Coordinate Assignment with Prescribed Width

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flow-based method for horizontal coordinate assignment in hierarchical graph drawing that accommodates prescribed widths and other layout constraints, improving flexibility and competitiveness.

Contribution

It presents a novel minimum cost flow formulation for coordinate assignment that supports prescribed widths and additional layout constraints.

Findings

The flow formulation effectively handles prescribed widths.

The approach competes with state-of-the-art algorithms.

It supports additional layout constraints like node spacing.

Abstract

We consider the coordinate assignment phase of the well known Sugiyama framework for drawing directed graphs in a hierarchical style. The extensive literature in this area has given comparatively little attention to a prescribed width of the drawing. We present a minimum cost flow formulation that supports prescribed width and optionally other criteria like lower and upper bounds on the distance of neighbouring nodes in a layer or enforced vertical edges segments. In our experiments we demonstrate that our approach can compete with state-of-the-art algorithms.