A Force Directed Placement Method Including Angular Resolution and Bond Overlap

Sammanfattning: This study presents a variant of the "spring method" for visualizing simple and undirected graphs. In addition to elementary spring energies, we introduce continuous energy terms for bond angles and bond overlap. To find a good graph layout, the energy of a graph is minimized using an optimization technique including the conjugate gradient method. We strive for a simple, flexible, conceptually intuitive and efficient algorithm. Experiments indicate good results from reducing bond overlap, while optimizing bond angles are more difficult without sacrificing other visualization qualities.