A Heuristic Approach towards Drawings of Graphs with High Crossing Resolution

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new heuristic algorithm to maximize crossing resolution in graph drawings, improving clarity but with a trade-off in aspect ratio, especially for large graphs.

Contribution

A novel heuristic algorithm for crossing resolution maximization in graph drawings, with experimental comparison to existing methods.

Findings

The new heuristic yields higher crossing resolution.

It results in a slightly higher aspect ratio for large graphs.

Experimental results favor the new heuristic over previous approaches.

Abstract

The crossing resolution of a non-planar drawing of a graph is the value of the minimum angle formed by any pair of crossing edges. Recent experiments have shown that the larger the crossing resolution is, the easier it is to read and interpret a drawing of a graph. However, maximizing the crossing resolution turns out to be an NP-hard problem in general and only heuristic algorithms are known that are mainly based on appropriately adjusting force-directed algorithms. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic algorithm for the crossing resolution maximization problem and we experimentally compare it against the known approaches from the literature. Our experimental evaluation indicates that the new heuristic produces drawings with better crossing resolution, but this comes at the cost of slightly higher aspect ratio, especially when the input graph is large.