Generalizing the shift method for rectangular shaped vertices with visibility constraints

Abstract

In this paper we present a generalization of the shift method algorithm [4,6] to obtain a straight-line grid drawing of a triconnected graph, where vertex representations have a certain specified size. We propose vertex representations having a rectangular shape. Additionally, one may demand maintainance of the criterion of strong visibility, that is, any possible line segment connecting two adjacent vertices cannot cross another vertex' representation. We prove that the proposed method produces a straight-line grid drawing of a graph in linear time with an area bound, that is only extended by the size of the rectangles, compared to the bound of the original algorithm. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.