Confluent Layered Drawings

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel confluent layered drawing technique that reduces edge crossings and enhances graph readability by replacing bicliques with tree-like structures, using heuristic algorithms for biclique cover problems.

Contribution

It combines confluent drawings with Sugiyama style layouts, proposing a method to replace bicliques with trees to improve clarity and understandability of layered graphs.

Findings

Reduces edge crossings in layered graph drawings.

Improves graph comprehension with mixed style visualizations.

Extends to multi-depth confluent layered drawings.

Abstract

We combine the idea of confluent drawings with Sugiyama style drawings, in order to reduce the edge crossings in the resultant drawings. Furthermore, it is easier to understand the structures of graphs from the mixed style drawings. The basic idea is to cover a layered graph by complete bipartite subgraphs (bicliques), then replace bicliques with tree-like structures. The biclique cover problem is reduced to a special edge coloring problem and solved by heuristic coloring algorithms. Our method can be extended to obtain multi-depth confluent layered drawings.