1. A method for facilitating the assignment of alternating voltage potentials to a set of shield wires in a routing layer of an integrated circuit, comprising: generating a set of vertices representing at least a portion of the set of shield wires and of edges representing adjacency of at least the portion of the set of shield wires; minimizing a set of edges in the set of vertices to obtain a minimized set of vertices; and assigning a first indicator to one vertex of the minimized set of vertices.