Further Towards Unambiguous Edge Bundling: Investigating Power-Confluent Drawings for Network Visualization

Abstract: Bach et al. [1] recently presented an algorithm for constructing confluent drawings, by leveraging power graph decomposition to generate an auxiliary routing graph. We identify two issues with their method which we call the node split and short-circuit problems, and solve both by modifying the routing graph to retain the hierarchical structure of power groups. We also classify the exact type of confluent drawings that the algorithm can produce as 'power-confluent', and prove that it is a subclass of the previously studied 'strict confluent' drawing. A description and source code of our implementation is also provided, which additionally includes an improved method for power graph construction.