More Compact Orthogonal Drawings by Allowing Additional Bends †

Abstract

Compacting orthogonal drawings is a challenging task. Usually, algorithms try to compute drawings with small area or total edge length while preserving the underlying orthogonal shape. We suggest a moderate relaxation of the orthogonal compaction problem, namely the one-dimensional monotone flexible edge compaction problem with fixed vertex star geometry. We further show that this problem can be solved in polynomial time using a network flow model. An experimental evaluation shows that by allowing additional bends could reduce the total edge length and the drawing area.

Keywords

• orthogonal compaction
• graph drawing
• total edge length
• Bends
• flow-based compaction