A Greedy Heuristic for Crossing Angle Maximization
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The crossing angle of a straight-line drawing Γ of a graph G=(V, E) is the smallest angle between two crossing edges in Γ. Deciding whether a graph G has a straight-line drawing with a crossing angle of 90^∘ is NP-hard. We propose a simple heuristic to compute a drawing with a large crossing angle. The heuristic greedily selects the best position for a single vertex in a random set of points. The algorithm is accompanied by a speed-up technique to compute the crossing angle of a straight-line drawing. We show the effectiveness of the heuristic in an extensive empirical evaluation. Our heuristic was clearly the winning algorithm (CoffeeVM) in the Graph Drawing Challenge 2017.
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