A Split & Push Approach to 3D Orthogonal Drawing

We present a method for constructing orthogonal drawings of graphs of maximum degree six in three dimensions. The method is based on generating the final drawing through a sequence of steps, starting from a “degenerate” drawing. At each step the drawing “splits” into two pieces and finds a structure more similar to its final version. Also, we test the effectiveness of our approach by performing an experimental comparison with several existing algorithms. Communicated by G. Liotta and S. H. Whitesides: submitted March 1999; revised April 2000. Research supported in part by the ESPRIT LTR Project no. 20244 ALCOM-IT and by the CNR Project “Geometria Computazionale Robusta con Applicazioni alla Grafica ed al CAD.” An extended abstract of this paper was presented at the 6th International Symposium on Graph Drawing, GD’98, Montreal, Canada, August 1998. G. Di Battista et al., 3D Orthogonal Drawing, JGAA, 4(3) 105–133 (2000) 106