On Upward-Planar L-Drawings of Graphs

TL;DR

This paper explores upward-planar L-drawings of DAGs, extending previous work on st-graphs to more general DAGs, providing combinatorial characterizations and efficient algorithms for testing their existence.

Contribution

It characterizes when general DAGs admit upward-planar L-drawings and develops linear-time algorithms for specific classes of DAGs.

Findings

A plane DAG admits an upward-planar L-drawing iff it is a subgraph of a suitable plane st-graph.

Not all trees with fixed bimodal embedding admit such drawings.

Cacti with a single source or sink admit upward-planar L-drawings under certain conditions.

Abstract

In an upward-planar L-drawing of a directed acyclic graph (DAG) each edge $e$ is represented as a polyline composed of a vertical segment with its lowest endpoint at the tail of $e$ and of a horizontal segment ending at the head of $e$. Distinct edges may overlap, but not cross. Recently, upward-planar L-drawings have been studied for $st$-graphs, i.e., planar DAGs with a single source $s$ and a single sink $t$ containing an edge directed from $s$ to $t$. It is known that a plane $st$-graph, i.e., an embedded $st$-graph in which the edge $(s,t)$ is incident to the outer face, admits an upward-planar L-drawing if and only if it admits a bitonic $st$-ordering, which can be tested in linear time. We study upward-planar L-drawings of DAGs that are not necessarily $st$-graphs. On the combinatorial side, we show that a plane DAG admits an upward-planar L-drawing if and only if it is a subgraph of a plane $st$-graph admitting a bitonic $st$-ordering. This allows us to show that not every tree with a fixed bimodal embedding admits an upward-planar L-drawing. Moreover, we prove that any acyclic cactus with a single source (or a single sink) admits an upward-planar L-drawing, which respects a given outerplanar embedding if there are no transitive edges. On the algorithmic side, we consider DAGs with a single source (or a single sink). We give linear-time testing algorithms for these DAGs in two cases: (i) when the drawing must respect a prescribed embedding and (ii) when no restriction is given on the embedding, but it is biconnected and series-parallel.