An experimental comparison of force-directed and randomized graph drawing algorithms

Abstract

We report on our experiments with five graph drawing algorithms for general undirected graphs. These are the algorithms FR introduced by Fruchterman and Reingold [5], KK by Kamada and Kawai [11], DH by Davidson and Harel [1], Tu by Tunkelang [13] and GEM by Frick, Ludwig and Mehldau [6]. Implementations of these algorithms have been integrated into our GraphEd system [9]. We have tested these algorithms on a wide collection of examples and with different settings of parameters. Our examples are from original papers and by our own. The obtained drawings are evaluated both empirically and by GraphEd's evaluation toolkit. As a conclusion we can confirm the reported good behaviour of the algorithms. Combining time and quality we recommend to use GEM or KK first, then FR and Tu and finally DH.