Confluent Drawings: Visualizing Non-planar Diagrams in a Planar Way
<|reference_start|>Confluent Drawings: Visualizing Non-planar Diagrams in a Planar Way: In this paper, we introduce a new approach for drawing diagrams that have applications in software visualization. Our approach is to use a technique we call confluent drawing for visualizing non-planar diagrams in a planar way. This approach allows us to draw, in a crossing-free manner, graphs--such as software interaction diagrams--that would normally have many crossings. The main idea of this approach is quite simple: we allow groups of edges to be merged together and drawn as "tracks" (similar to train tracks). Producing such confluent diagrams automatically from a graph with many crossings is quite challenging, however, so we offer two heuristic algorithms to test if a non-planar graph can be drawn efficiently in a confluent way. In addition, we identify several large classes of graphs that can be completely categorized as being either confluently drawable or confluently non-drawable.<|reference_end|>
@article{dickerson2002confluent,
    title={Confluent Drawings: Visualizing Non-planar Diagrams in a Planar Way},
    author={Matthew Dickerson and David Eppstein and Michael T. Goodrich and
  Jeremy Meng},
    journal={J. Graph Algorithms and Applications (special issue for GD'03)
  9(1):31-52, 2005.},
    year={2002},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={cs/0212046},
    primaryClass={cs.CG cs.SE}
}