Experimental and theoretical results in interactive orthogonal graph drawing

Abstract

Interactive Graph Drawing allows the user to dynamically interact with a drawing as the design progresses while preserving the user’s mental map. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of Relative- Coordinates and an extensive experimental study comparing the performance of two interactive orthogonal graph drawing scenaria: No-Change, and Relative-Coordinates. Our theoretical analysis found that the Relative- Coordinates scenario builds a drawing that has no more than 3n – 1 bends, while the area of the drawing is never larger than 2.25n2. Also, no edge has more than 3 bends at any time during the drawing process. To conduct the experiments, we used a large set of test data consisting of 11,491 graphs (ranging from 6 to 100 nodes) and compared the behavior of the above two scenaria with respect to various aesthetic properties (e.g., area, bends, crossings, edge length, etc) of the corresponding drawings. The Relative-Coordinates scenario was a winner over No-Change under any aesthetic measure considered in our experiments. Moreover, the practical behavior of the two scenaria was considerably better than the established theoretical bounds, in most cases.