We consider upward-planar layered drawings of directed graphs, i.e., crossing-free drawings in which each edge is drawn as a y-monotone curve going upward from its tail to its head, and the y-coordinates of the vertices are integers. The span of an edge in such a drawing is the absolute difference between the y-coordinates of its endpoints, and the span of the drawing is the maximum span of any edge. The span of an upward-planar graph is the minimum span over all its upward-planar drawings. We study the problem of determining the span of upward-planar graphs and provide both combinatorial and algorithmic results. On the combinatorial side, we present upper and lower bounds for the span of directed trees. On the algorithmic side, we show that the problem of determining the span of an upward-planar graph is NP-complete already for directed trees and for biconnected single-source graphs. Moreover, we give efficient algorithms for several graph families with a bounded number of sources, including st-planar graphs and graphs where the planar or upward-planar embedding is prescribed. Furthermore, we show that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the vertex cover number and the treedepth plus the span.

Abstract We say that a (multi)graph $$ \user2{G} = (\user2{V},\user2{E}) $$ has geometric thickness t if there exists a straight-line drawing $$ \user2{\varphi }:\user2{V} \to \mathbb{R}^{{\mathbf{2}}} $$ and a t -coloring of its edges where no two edges sharing a point in their relative interior have the same color. The Geometric Thickness problem asks whether a given multigraph has geometric thickness at most t . This problem was shown to be NP-hard for $$ \user2{t} = \mathbf{2} $$ (Durocher et al. Comput Geom 56:1–18, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comgeo.2016.03.003 ). In this paper, we settle the computational complexity of Geometric Thickness by showing that it is $$\exists \mathbb {R}$$ -complete already for thickness 30 . Moreover, our reduction shows that the problem is $$\exists \mathbb {R}$$ -complete for 4392 -planar graphs, where a graph is k -planar if it admits a topological drawing with at most k crossings per edge. In the course of our paper we answer previous questions on geometric thickness and on other related problems, in particular that simultaneous graph embeddings of 31 edge-disjoint graphs and pseudo-segment stretchability with chromatic number 30 are $$\exists \mathbb {R}$$ -complete.

This paper studies planar drawings of graphs in which each vertex is represented as a point along a sequence of horizontal lines, called levels, and each edge is either a horizontal segment or a strictly y -monotone curve. A graph is s -span weakly leveled planar if it admits such a drawing where the edges have span at most s ; the span of an edge is the number of levels it touches minus one. We investigate the problem of computing s -span weakly leveled planar drawings from both the computational and the combinatorial perspectives. We prove the problem to be para-NP-hard with respect to its natural parameter s and investigate its complexity with respect to widely used structural parameters. We show the existence of a polynomial-size kernel with respect to vertex cover number and prove that the problem is FPT when parameterized by treedepth. We also present upper and lower bounds on the span for various graph classes. Notably, we show that cycle trees, a family of 2-outerplanar graphs generalizing Halin graphs, are Θ(log n )-span weakly leveled planar and 4-span weakly leveled planar when 3-connected. As a byproduct of these combinatorial results, we obtain improved bounds on the edge-length ratio of the graph families under consideration.

A witness Gabriel drawing Γ is a straight-line drawing of a graph in which any two vertices of Γ are adjacent if and only if the disk having these vertices as antipodal points contains no element of a special set of points called witnesses. A witness Gabriel drawing is linearly separable if the vertices and the witnesses lie in opposite half-planes. We prove that every outerplanar graph has a linearly separable witness Gabriel drawing by introducing and studying a new type of drawing that we call a border parabola drawing. We then use border parabola drawings to characterize those triangle-free graphs that admit a linearly separable witness Gabriel drawing. We also consider witness Gabriel drawings where no witness lies in the interior of the convex hull of the vertex set, which we call convexly separable drawings. We construct witness Gabriel drawable graphs for which any witness Gabriel drawing must be convexly separable and that do not admit any linearly separable witness Gabriel drawing.

This paper studies planar drawings of graphs in which each vertex is represented as a point along a sequence of horizontal lines, called levels, and each edge is either a horizontal segment or a strictly $y$-monotone curve. A graph is $s$-span weakly leveled planar if it admits such a drawing where the edges have span at most $s$; the span of an edge is the number of levels it touches minus one. We investigate the problem of computing $s$-span weakly leveled planar drawings from both the computational and the combinatorial perspectives. We prove the problem to be para-NP-hard with respect to its natural parameter $s$ and investigate its complexity with respect to widely used structural parameters. We show the existence of a polynomial-size kernel with respect to vertex cover number and prove that the problem is FPT when parameterized by treedepth. We also present upper and lower bounds on the span for various graph classes. Notably, we show that cycle trees, a family of $2$-outerplanar graphs generalizing Halin graphs, are $Θ(\log n)$-span weakly leveled planar and $4$-span weakly leveled planar when $3$-connected. As a byproduct of these combinatorial results, we obtain improved bounds on the edge-length ratio of the graph families under consideration.

We introduce the $k$-Plane Insertion into Plane drawing ($k$-PIP) problem: given a plane drawing of a planar graph $G$ and a set $F$ of edges, insert the edges in $F$ into the drawing such that the resulting drawing is $k$-plane. In this paper, we show that the problem is NP-complete for every $k\ge 1$, even when $G$ is biconnected and the set $F$ of edges forms a matching or a path. On the positive side, we present a linear-time algorithm for the case that $k=1$ and $G$ is a triangulation.

Abstract For sets of n points, n even, in general position in the plane, we consider straight-line drawings of perfect matchings on them. It is well known that such sets admit at least $$C_{n/2}$$ C n / 2 different plane perfect matchings, where $$C_{n/2}$$ C n / 2 is the n /2-th Catalan number. Generalizing this result we are interested in the number of drawings of perfect matchings which have k crossings. We show the following results. (1) For every $$k\le \frac{1}{64}n^2-\frac{35}{32}n\sqrt{n}+\frac{1225}{64}n$$ k ≤ 1 64 n 2 - 35 32 n n + 1225 64 n , any set with n points, n sufficiently large, admits a perfect matching with exactly k crossings. (2) There exist sets of n points where every perfect matching has at most $$\frac{5}{72}n^2-\frac{n}{4}$$ 5 72 n 2 - n 4 crossings. (3) The number of perfect matchings with at most k crossings is superexponential in n if k is superlinear in n . (4) Point sets in convex position minimize the number of perfect matchings with at most k crossings for $$k=0,1,2$$ k = 0 , 1 , 2 , and maximize the number of perfect matchings with $$\left( {\begin{array}{c}n/2\\ 2\end{array}}\right) $$ n / 2 2 crossings and with $${\left( {\begin{array}{c}n/2\\ 2\end{array}}\right) }\!-\!1$$ n / 2 2 - 1

The problem of deciding whether a biconnected planar digraph $G=(V,E)$ can be augmented to become an $st$-planar graph by adding a set of oriented edges $E' \subseteq V \times V$ is known to be NP-complete. We show that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the size of the set $E'$.

Abstract In geographic data analysis, one is often given point data of different categories (such as facilities of a university categorized by department). Drawing upon recent research on set visualization, we want to visualize category membership by connecting points of the same category with visual links. Existing approaches that follow this path usually insist on connecting all members of a category, which may lead to many crossings and visual clutter. We propose an approach that avoids crossings between connections of different categories completely. Instead of connecting all data points of the same category, we subdivide categories into smaller, local clusters where needed. We do a case study comparing the legibility of drawings produced by our approach and those by existing approaches. In our problem formulation, we are additionally given a graph G on the data points whose edges express some sort of proximity. Our aim is to find a subgraph G′ of G with the following properties: (i) edges connect only data points of the same category, (ii) no two edges cross, and (iii) the number of connected components (clusters) is minimized. We then visualize the clusters in G′. For arbitrary graphs, the resulting optimization problem, Cluster Minimization, is NP‐hard (even to approximate). Therefore, we introduce two heuristics. We do an extensive benchmark test on real‐world data. Comparisons with exact solutions indicate that our heuristics do astonishing well for certain relative‐neighborhood graphs.

It is well-known that every planar graph has a Tutte path, i.e., a path $P$ such that any component of $G-P$ has at most three attachment points on $P$. However, it was only recently shown that such Tutte paths can be found in polynomial time. In this paper, we give a new proof that 3-connected planar graphs have Tutte paths, which leads to a linear-time algorithm to find Tutte paths. Furthermore, our Tutte path has special properties: it visits all exterior vertices, all components of $G-P$ have exactly three attachment points, and we can assign distinct representatives to them that are interior vertices. Finally, our running time bound is slightly stronger; we can bound it in terms of the degrees of the faces that are incident to $P$. This allows us to find some applications of Tutte paths (such as binary spanning trees and 2-walks) in linear time as well.

Given a planar graph G and a partition of the neighbors of each vertex v in four sets v ↗ , v ↖ , v ↙ , and v ↘ , the problem W indrose P lanarity asks to decide whether G admits a windrose-planar drawing , that is, a planar drawing in which (i) each neighbor u ∈ v ↗ v is above and to the right of v , (ii) each neighbor u ∈ v ↖ is above and to the left of v , (iii) each neighbor u ∈ v ↙ is below and to the left of v , (iv) each neighbor u ∈ v ↘ is below and to the right of v , and (v) edges are represented by curves that are monotone with respect to each axis. By exploiting both the horizontal and the vertical relationship among vertices, windrose-planar drawings allow us to simultaneously visualize two partial orders defined by means of the edges of the graph. Although the problem is NP -hard in the general case, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for testing whether there exists a windrose-planar drawing that respects a given combinatorial embedding. This algorithm is based on a characterization of the plane triangulations admitting a windrose-planar drawing. Furthermore, for any embedded graph with n vertices that has a windrose-planar drawing, we can construct one with at most one bend per edge and with at most 2 n −5 bends in total, which lies on the 3 n × 3 n grid. The latter result contrasts with the fact that straight-line windrose-planar drawings may require exponential area.

A straight-line drawing of a graph is a monotone drawing if for each pair of vertices there is a path which is monotonically increasing in some direction, and it is called a strongly monotone drawing if the direction of monotonicity is given by the direction of the line segment connecting the two vertices. We present algorithms to compute crossing-free strongly monotone drawings for some classes of planar graphs; namely, 3-connected planar graphs, outerplanar graphs, and 2-trees. The drawings of 3-connected planar graphs are based on primal-dual circle packings. Our drawings of outerplanar graphs depend on a new algorithm that constructs strongly monotone drawings of trees which are also convex. For irreducible trees, these drawings are strictly convex.

Given a planar graph G(V, E) and a partition of the neighbors of each vertex v ∊ V in four sets , and , the problem Windrose Planarity asks to decide whether G admits a windrose-planar drawing, that is, a planar drawing in which (i) each neighbor u ∊ is above and to the right of v, (ii) each neighbor u ∊ is above and to the left of v, (iii) each neighbor u ∊ is below and to the left of v, (iv) each neighbor u ∊ is below and to the right of v, and (v) edges are represented by curves that are monotone with respect to each axis. By exploiting both the horizontal and the vertical relationship among vertices, windrose-planar drawings allow to simultaneously visualize two partial orders defined by means of the edges of the graph. Although the problem is -hard in the general case, we give a polynomial-time algorithm for testing whether there exists a windrose-planar drawing that respects a combinatorial embedding that is given as part of the input. This algorithm is based on a characterization of the plane triangulations admitting a windrose-planar drawing. Furthermore, for any embedded graph admitting a windrose-planar drawing we show how to construct one with at most one bend per edge on an O(n) × O(n) grid. The latter result contrasts with the fact that straight-line windrose-planar drawings may require exponential area.