Efficient, High-Quality Force-Directed Graph Drawing

We propose a graph drawing algorithm that is both efficient and high quality. This algorithm combines a multilevel approach, which effectively overcomes local minimums, with the Barnes and Hut [1] octree technique, which approximates shortand long-range force efficiently. Our numerical results show that the algorithm is comparable in speed to Walshaw’s [2] highly efficient multilevel graph drawing algorithm, yet gives better results on some of the difficult problems. In addition, an adaptive cooling scheme for the force-directed algorithms and a general repulsive force model are proposed. The proposed graph drawing algorithm and others are included with Mathematica 5.1 and later versions in the package DiscreteMath‘GraphÑ Plot.