Contact representations of graphs in 3D

Abstract

We study contact representations of non-planar graphs in which vertices are represented by axis-aligned polyhedra in 3D and edges are realized by non-zero area common boundaries between corresponding polyhedra. We present a liner-time algorithm constructing a representation of a 3-connected planar graph, its dual, and the vertex-face incidence graph with 3D boxes. We then investigate contact representations of 1- planar graphs. We first prove that optimal 1-planar graphs without separating 4-cycles admit a contact representation with 3D boxes. However, since not every optimal 1-planar graph can be represented in this way, we also consider contact representations with the next simplest axis-aligned 3D object, L-shaped polyhedra. We provide a quadratic-time algorithm for representing optimal 1-planar graphs with L-shapes.