1-planarity testing and embedding: An experimental study

Abstract

Many papers study the natural problem of drawing nonplanar graphs with few crossings per edge. In particular, a graph is 1-planar if it can be drawn in the plane with at most one crossing per edge. Unfortunately, while testing graph planarity is solvable in linear time and several efficient algorithms have been described in the literature, deciding whether a graph is 1-planar is NP-complete, even for restricted classes of graphs. Despite some polynomial-time algorithms are known for recognizing specific subfamilies of 1-planar graphs, there is still a lack of practical 1-planarity testing algorithms and no implementation is available for general graphs. This paper investigates the feasibility of a 1-planarity testing and embedding algorithm based on a backtracking strategy. Our contribution provides initial indications that have the potential to stimulate further research on the design of practical approaches for the 1-planarity testing problem. On the one hand, our experiments show that a backtracking strategy can be successfully applied to graphs with up to 30 vertices. On the other hand, our study suggests that alternative techniques are needed to attack larger graphs.