CoSEP: A compound spring embedder layout algorithm with support for ports

Abstract

This paper describes a new automatic layout algorithm named CoSEP for compound graphs with port constraints. The algorithm works by extending the physical model of a previous algorithm named CoSE by defining additional force types and heuristics for constraining edges to connect to certain user-defined locations on end nodes. Similar to its predecessor, CoSEP also accounts for non-uniform node dimensions and arbitrary levels of nesting via compound nodes. Our experiments show that CoSEP significantly improves the quality of the layouts for compound graphs with port constraints with respect to commonly accepted graph drawing criteria while running reasonably fast, suitable for use in interactive applications for small to medium-sized (up to 500 nodes) graphs. A complete JavaScript implementation of CoSEP as a Cytoscape.js extension along with a demo page is freely available at https://github.com/iVis-at-Bilkent/cytoscape.js-cosep.