Efficient Orthogonal Drawings of High Degree Graphs

Most of the work that appears in the two-dimensional orthogonal graph drawing literature deals with graphs whose maximum degree is four. In this paper we present an algorithm for orthogonal drawings of simple graphs with degree higher than four. Vertices are represented by rectangular boxes of perimeter less than twice the degree of the vertex. Our algorithm is based on creating groups / pairs of vertices of the graph. The orthogonal drawings produced by our algorithm have area at most (m-1) ( m / 2 +2) . Two important properties of our algorithm are that the drawings exhibit a small total number of bends (less than m ), and that there is at most one bend per edge. Received January 15, 1997; revised February 1, 1998.