Topology-Driven Force-Directed Algorithms

This paper studies the problem of designing graph drawing algorithms that guarantee good trade-offs in terms of number of edge crossings, crossing angle resolution, and geodesic edge tendency. It describes two heuristics designed within the topology-driven force-directed framework that combines two classical graph drawing approaches: the force-directed approach and a planarization-based approach (e.g., the topology-shape-metrics approach). An extensive experimental analysis on two different test suites of graphs shows the effectiveness of the proposed solutions for the optimization of some readability metrics.