The effect of almost-empty faces on planar Kandinsky drawings

Abstract

Inspired by the recently-introduced slanted orthogonal graph drawing model, we introduce and study planar Kandinsky drawings with almost-empty faces (i.e., faces that were forbidden in the classical Kandinsky model). Based on a recent NP-completeness result for Kandinsky drawings by Bläsius et al., we present and experimentally evaluate (i) an ILP that computes bend-optimal Kandinsky drawings with almost-empty faces, and, (ii) a more efficient heuristic that results in drawings with relatively few bends. Our evaluation shows that the new model, in the presence of many triangular faces, not only improves the number of bends, but also the compactness of the resulting drawings.