Tech Report CS-96-24

Drawing Directed Acyclic Graphs: An Experimental Study (Preliminary Version)

Giuseppe Di Battista, Ashim Garg, Giuseppe Liotta, Armando Parise, Roberto Tamassia, Emanuele Tassinari, Francesco Vargiu, Luca Vismara

October 1996

Abstract:

In this paper we consider the class of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), and present the results of an experimental study on four drawing algorithms specifically developed for DAGs. Our study is conducted on two large test suites of DAGs and yields more than 30 charts comparing the performance of the drawing algorithms with respect to several quality measures, including area, crossings, bends, and aspect ratio. The algorithms exhibit various trade-offs with respect to the quality measures, and none of them clearly outperforms the others.

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