An Integer-Linear Program for Bend-Minimization in Ortho-Radial Drawings

Abstract

An ortho-radial grid is described by concentric circles and straight-line spokes emanating from the circles' center. An ortho-radial drawing is the analog of an orthogonal drawing on an ortho-radial grid. Such a drawing has an unbounded outer face and a central face that contains the origin. Building on the notion of an ortho-radial representation (Barth et al., SoCG, 2017), we describe an integer-linear program (ILP) for computing bend-free ortho-radial representations with a given embedding and fixed outer and central face. Using the ILP as a building block, we introduce a pruning technique to compute bend-optimal ortho-radial drawings with a given embedding and a fixed outer face, but freely choosable central face. Our experiments show that, in comparison with orthogonal drawings using the same embedding and the same outer face, the use of ortho-radial drawings reduces the number of bends by 43.8% on average. Further, our approach allows us to compute ortho-radial drawings of embedded graphs such as the metro system of Beijing or London within seconds.

Appears in the Proceedings of the 28th International Symposium on Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2020)