Overloaded orthogonal drawings

Abstract

Orthogonal drawings are widely used for graph visualization due to their high clarity of representation. In this paper we present a technique called Overloaded Orthogonal Drawing. We first place the vertices on grid points following a relaxed version of dominance drawing, called weak dominance condition. Edge routing is implied automatically by the vertex coordinates. In order to simplify these drawings we use an overloading technique. All algorithms are simple and easy to implement and can be applied to directed acyclic graphs, planar, non-planar and also undirected graphs. We also present bounds on the number of bends and the area. Overloaded Orthogonal drawings present several interesting properties such as efficient visual edge confirmation as well as simplicity and clarity of the drawing. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.