Evolving Smart Initial Layouts for Force-Directed Graph Drawing
Farshad Ghassemi Toosi, Nikola S. Nikolov, Malachy Eaton · 2015
We propose a genetic algorithm (GA) for solving the maximization version of the Optimal Linear Arrangement problem and we also demonstrate how solutions found by it can be used for constructing smart initial layouts for force-directed graph drawing. Effectively, we show that our GA can be used as a first step in force-directed graph drawing for achieving more aesthetically pleasing graph layouts at the end. We present experimental results which show that the initial layouts based on the solutions of our GA reduce the number of edge crossings in force-directed graph layouts.