A Multi-agent Approach using A-Teams for Graph Drawing

Graph drawing consists of producing good drawings of graphs, given the vertices and edges (see Figure 1). In general, a ‘good’ drawing exhibits some aesthetic criteria and/or satisfies some constraints in order to make the drawing pleasant and legible for human eyes. Examples of desirable aesthetic criteria described in the literature [1,2,3,4,5,6] are: • show few edges crossings, • show symmetry, • uniformly distribute the vertices and edges in the space provided for the drawing, • show edges in an uniform direction as much as possible (for directed graphs), and • avoid long edges. In a specific application, there may be some constraints. For example, one can consider to draw a specific vertex or edge in a particular way, using a different graphical standard, or to draw a selected group of vertices very close to each other. Graph drawing methods have applications in many branches of computing such as in software engineering (for drawing subroutine-call graphs, object-oriented class hierarchies, etc.) and in database (for showing entity-relationship diagrams). Figure 1: Graph drawing activity.