A Simple Pipeline for Orthogonal Graph Drawing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a flexible, multi-step pipeline for orthogonal graph drawing that minimizes bends, crossings, and area, featuring a novel edge-nudging algorithm based on linear programming.

Contribution

The paper presents a new, effective edge-nudging algorithm and a simple, integrated pipeline that produces competitive orthogonal graph drawings with minimal bends and overlaps.

Findings

The pipeline achieves fewer bends and crossings compared to existing methods.

Experimental results show the pipeline's effectiveness on standard benchmarks.

The approach is flexible and integrates well with other graph drawing techniques.

Abstract

Orthogonal graph drawing has many applications, e.g., for laying out UML diagrams or cableplans. In this paper, we present a new pipeline that draws multigraphs orthogonally, using few bends, few crossings, and small area. Our pipeline computes an initial graph layout, then removes overlaps between the rectangular nodes, routes the edges, orders the edges, and nudges them, that is, moves edge segments in order to balance the inter-edge distances. Our pipeline is flexible and integrates well with existing approaches. Our main contribution is (i) an effective edge-nudging algorithm that is based on linear programming, (ii) a selection of simple algorithms that together produce competitive results, and (iii) an extensive experimental comparison of our pipeline with existing approaches using standard benchmark sets and metrics.