DRAWING DIRECTED ACYCLIC GRAPHS: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

In this paper we consider the important class of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), and present the results of a comparative study on four popular drawing algorithms specifically developed for them. The study has been performed within a general experimental setting consisting of two large test suites of DAGs and a set of quality measures. The focus of the experiments has been the practical behavior of the algorithms with a geometric foundation compared to that of the algorithms with a topological foundation. The four algorithms exhibit various trade-offs with respect to the quality measures considered, and none of them clearly outperforms the others. Our analysis has motivated the development of a new hybrid strategy for drawing DAGs that performs quite well in practice.