Drawing directed graphs clockwise

Abstract

We present a method for clockwise drawings of directed cyclic graphs. It is based on the eigenvalue decomposition of a skew-symmetric matrix associated with the graph and draws edges clockwise around the center instead of downwards, as in the traditional hierarchical drawing style. The method does not require preprocessing for cycle removal or layering, which often involves computationally hard problems. We describe an efficient algorithm which produces optimal solutions, and we present some application examples. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.