Confluent drawings
Michael T. Goodrich, Meng Yu · 2006
This dissertation introduces a novel approach for visualizing diagrams. The main idea is a technique called confluent drawing, which is used for drawing non-planar diagrams in a planar way. The idea is simple: we allow a group of edges to be merged together and drawn as tracks, which are similar to train tracks. This method allows us to draw graphs, which would have many edge crossings if drawn normally, in a crossing-free maner. We investigate several classes of graphs that can be drawn confluently, along with several classes of graphs that are not confluently drawable. Problems and algorithms related to confluent drawings are studied. The idea of confluency is applied to layered drawings of dense graphs as well, when the planarity constrain is relaxed.