Edge bundling reduces the visual clutter in a drawing of a graph by uniting the edges into bundles. We propose a method of edge bundling drawing each edge of a bundle separately as in metro-maps and call our method ordered bundles. To produce aesthetically looking edge routes it minimizes a cost function on the edges. The cost function depends on the ink, required to draw the edges, the edge lengths, widths and separations. The cost also penalizes for too many edges passing through narrow channels by using the constrained Delaunay triangulation. The method avoids unnecessary edge-node and edge-edge crossings. To draw edges with the minimal number of crossings and separately within the same bundle we develop an efficient algorithm solving a variant of the metro-line crossing minimization problem. In general, the method creates clear and smooth edge routes giving an overview of the global graph structure, while still drawing each edge separately and thus enabling local analysis.
In this paper we consider a new problem that occurs when drawing wiring diagrams or public transportation networks. Given an embedded graph G = (V, E) (e.g., the streets served by a bus network) and a set L of paths in G (e.g., the bus lines), we want to draw the paths along the edges of G such that they cross each other as few times as possible. For esthetic reasons we insist that the relative order of the paths that traverse a node does not change within the area occupied by that node. Our main contribution is an algorithm that minimizes the number of crossings on a single edge u, v ∈ E if we are given the order of the incoming and outgoing paths. The difficulty is deciding the order of the paths that terminate in u or v with respect to the fixed order of the paths that do not end there. Our algorithm uses dynamic programming and takes O(n2) time, where n is the number of terminating paths. The metro-line crossing minimization (MLCM) problem was recently introduced as a response to the problem of drawing metro maps or public transportation networks, in general. According to this problem, we are given a planar, embedded graph G = (V ,E ) and a set L of simple paths on G , called lines . The main task is to place the lines on G , so that the number of crossings among pairs of lines is minimized. Our main contribution is two polynomial time algorithms. The first solves the general case of the MLCM problem, where the lines that traverse a particular vertex of G are allowed to use any side of it to either "enter" or "exit", assuming that the endpoints of the lines are located at vertices of degree one. The second one solves more efficiently the restricted case, where only the left and the right side of each vertex can be used. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time where the general case of the MLCM problem is solved. Previous work was devoted to the restricted case of the MLCM problem under the additional assumption that the endpoints of the lines are either the topmost or the bottommost in their corresponding vertices, i.e., they are either on top or below the lines that pass through the vertex. Even for this case, we improve a known result of from O (|E |5 2|L |3) to O (|V |(|E | + |L |)).  In this paper we consider a problem that occurs when drawing public transportation networks. Given an embedded graph G = (V, E) (e.g. the railroad network) and a set H of paths in G (e.g. the train lines), we want to draw the paths along the edges of G such that they cross each other as few times as possible. For aesthetic reasons we insist that the relative order of the paths that traverse a vertex does not change within the area occupied by the vertex. We prove that the problem, which is known to be NP-hard, can be rewritten as an integer linear program that finds the optimal solution for the problem. In the case when the order of the endpoints of the paths is fixed we prove that the problem can be solved in polynomial time. This improves a recent result by (2007). We consider the problem of drawing a set of simple paths along the edges of an embedded underlying graph G = (V,E), so that the total number of crossings among pairs of paths is minimized. This problem arises when drawing metro maps, where the embedding of G depicts the structure of the underlying network, the nodes of G correspond to train stations, an edge connecting two nodes implies that there exists a railway line which connects them, whereas the paths illustrate the lines connecting terminal stations. We call this the metro-line crossing minimization problem (MLCM). In contrast to the problem of drawing the underlying graph nicely, MLCM has received fewer attention. It was recently introduced by Benkert et. al in [4]. In this paper, as a first step towards solving MLCM in arbitrary graphs, we study path and tree networks.We examine several variations of the problem for which we develop algorithms for obtaining optimal solutions.