The drawability problem for minimum weight triangulations

A graph is minimum weight drawable if it admits a straight-line drawing that is a minimum weight triangulation of the set of points representing the vertices of the graph. We study the problem of characterizing those graphs that are minimum weight drawable. Our contribution is twofold: We show that there exist infinitely many triangulations that are not minimum weight drawable. Furthermore, we present non-trivial classes of triangulations that are minimum weight drawable, along with corresponding linear time algorithms that take as input any graph from one of these classes and produce as output such a drawing. One consequence of our work is the construction of triangulations that are minimum weight drawable but not Delaunay drawable – that is, not drawable as a Delaunay triangulation.