On Planar Straight-Line Dominance Drawings

We study the following question, which has been considered since the 90's: Does every st-planar graph admit a planar straight-line dominance drawing? We show concrete evidence for the difficulty of this question, by proving that, unlike upward planar straight-line drawings, planar straight-line dominance drawings with prescribed y-coordinates do not always exist and planar straight-line dominance drawings cannot always be constructed via a contract-draw-expand inductive approach. We also show several classes of st-planar graphs that always admit a planar straight-line dominance drawing. These include st-planar 3-trees in which every stacking operation introduces two edges incoming into the new vertex, st-planar graphs in which every vertex is adjacent to the sink, and st-planar graphs in which no face has the left boundary that is a single edge.