Confluent Layered Drawings

Abstract: We combine the idea of confluent drawings with Sugiyama style drawings, in order to reduce the edge crossings in the resultant drawings. Furthermore, it is easier to understand the structures of graphs from the mixed style drawings. The basic idea is to cover a layered graph by complete bipartite subgraphs (bicliques), then replace bicliques with tree-like structures. The biclique cover problem is reduced to a special edge coloring problem and solved by heuristic coloring algorithms. Our method can be extended to obtain multi-depth confluent layered drawings.