Refinement of three-dimensional orthogonal graph drawings

Abstract

In this paper we introduce a number of techniques for the refinement of three-dimensional orthogonal drawings of maximum degree six graphs. We have implemented several existing algorithms for three-dimensional orthogonal graph drawing including a number of heuristics to improve their performance. The performance of the refinements on the produced drawings is then evaluated in an extensive experimental study. We measure the aesthetic criteria of the bounding box volume, the average and maximum number of bends per edge, and the average and maximum edge length. On the same set of graphs used in Di Battista et al. [3], our main refinement algorithm improves the above aesthetic criteria by 80%, 38%, 10%, 54% and 49%, respectively.