The SPQR-tree data structure in graph drawing

  • Authors:
  • Petra Mutzel

  • Affiliations:
  • Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

  • Venue:
  • ICALP'03 Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Automata, languages and programming
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

The data structure SPQR-tree represents the decomposition of a biconnected graph with respect to its triconnected components. SPQR-trees have been introduced by Di Battista and Tamassia [13] based on ideas by Bienstock and Monma [9, 10]. For planar graphs, SPQR-trees have the nice property to represent the set of all its combinatorial embeddings. Therefore, the data structure has mainly (but not only) been used in the area of planar graph algorithms and graph layout. The techniques are quite manifold, reaching from special purpose algorithms that merge the solutions of the triconnected components in a clever way to a solution of the original graph, to general branch-andbound techniques and integer linear programming techniques. Applications reach from Steiner tree problems, to on-line problems in a dynamic setting as well as problems concerned with planarity and graph drawing. This paper gives a survey on the use of SPQR-trees in graph algorithms, with a focus on graph drawing.