Patrizio Angelini

On the perspectives opened by right angle crossing drawings

Right Angle Crossing (RAC) drawings are polyline drawings where each crossing forms four right angles. RAC drawings have been introduced because cognitive experiments provided evidence that increasing the number of crossings does not decrease the readability of the drawing if the edges cross at right angles. We investigate to what extent RAC drawings can help in overcoming the limitations of widely adopted planar graph drawing conventions, providing both positive and negative results. First, we prove that there exist acyclic planar digraphs not admitting any straight-line upward RAC drawing and that the corresponding decision problem is NP-hard. Also, we show digraphs whose straight-line upward RAC drawings require exponential area. Second, we study if RAC drawings allow us to draw bounded-degree graphs with lower curve complexity than the one required by more constrained drawing conventions. We prove that every graph with vertex-degree at most 6 (at most 3) admits a RAC drawing with curve complexity 2 (resp. 1) and with quadratic area. Third, we consider a natural non-planar generalization of planar embedded graphs. Here we give bounds for curve complexity and area different from the ones known for planar embeddings.

Succinct greedy drawings do not always exist

A greedy drawing is a graph drawing containing a distance-decreasing path for every pair of nodes. A path (v0,v1,...,vm) is distance-decreasing if d(vi,vm)<d(vi−1,vm), for i=1,...,m. Greedy drawings easily support geographic greedy routing. Hence, a natural and practical problem is the one of constructing greedy drawings in the plane using few bits for representing vertex Cartesian coordinates and using the Euclidean distance as a metric. We show that there exist greedy-drawable graphs that do not admit any greedy drawing in which the Cartesian coordinates have less than a polynomial number of bits.

Morphing planar graph drawings with a polynomial number of steps

In 1944, Cairns proved the following theorem: given any two straight-line planar drawings of a triangulation with the same outer face, there exists a morph (i.e., a continuous transformation) between the two drawings so that the drawing remains straight-line planar at all times. Cairnss original proof required exponentially many morphing steps. We prove that there is a morph that consists of O(n2) steps, where each step is a linear morph that moves each vertex at constant speed along a straight line. Using a known result on compatible triangulations this implies that for a general planar graph G and any two straight-line planar drawings of G with the same embedding, there is a morph between the two drawings that preserves straight-line planarity and consists of O(n4) steps.

Acyclically 3-colorable planar graphs

In this paper we study the acyclic 3-colorability of some subclasses of planar graphs. First, we show that there exist infinite classes of cubic planar graphs that are not acyclically 3-colorable. Then, we show that every planar graph has a subdivision with one vertex per edge that is acyclically 3-colorable and provide a linear-time coloring algorithm. Finally, we characterize the series-parallel graphs for which every 3-coloring is acyclic and provide a linear-time recognition algorithm for such graphs.

Small point sets for simply-nested planar graphs

A point set P⊆ℝ2 is universal for a class

On a tree and a path with no geometric simultaneous embedding

\cal G

Morphing Planar Graph Drawings Optimally

if every graph of

Relaxing the constraints of clustered planarity

{\cal G}

The Importance of Being Proper

has a planar straight-line embedding into P. We prove that there exists a

Upward Geometric Graph Embeddings into Point Sets

O(n (\frac{\log n}{\log\log n})^2)