Crossing-Minimization

Programs, scripts and other utilities related to minimizing crossings (and other objectives) in layered graphs. Instructions for compilation are in file INSTALLATION.txt MinCrossings.html gives an overview of what's in the repository. Currently, all programs use two input files, a .dot file whose format is that used by GraphViz and a .ord file that specifies the order of nodes on each layer. Translations from simpler formats are provided by two scripts in the scripts directory.

• sgf2dot+ord.py translates from sgf (simple graph format, documented at the beginning of the script) to dot and ord; requires Python 3 (but may work with Python 2)
• mlcm2dot+ord is a shell script that translates from mlcm to dot and ord by first translating to sgf and then using mlcm2sgf.py; documentation of the mlcm format is at the beginning of the latter

To run mce by itself, go to the src directory and (after make min_crossings), do ./min_crossings -p dfs -h mce -i ITERATIONS FILE.dot FILE.ord (for a specified number of iterations, at least 10,000); or ./min_crossings -p dfs -h mce -r TIME FILE.dot FILE.ord if a limit on runtime is desired.

For best results, add the option -R SEED to break ties by randomization (using a chosen seed).

To run a sequence of heuristics, as recommended in the 2012 JEA paper, use one of the variations of the followHeuristic script. The best combinations are (INPUT_DIR is a directory containg dot and ord files) followHeuristic_R INPUT_DIR OUTPUT_DIR mod_bary sifting when minimizing total crossings followHeuristic_R INPUT_DIR OUTPUT_DIR mod_bary mce when minimizing max crossings for any edge Edit the scripts so that the number of iterations or runtime for mod_bary is roughly 10-20% of the total.

Documentation for the scripts is in scripts/0_scripts.html Developer documentation for the source code can be obtained by running doxygen in the src directory.

The java utilities are used for layer assignment (breadth-first) when a graph is not already layered. Do javac *.java in the java-utilities directory to compile all of them.

java-utilities/00_dag_display_process.txt describes how to display a large layered graph. For displaying smaller graphs, we suggest using Galant after conversion to graphml (scripts available in scripts directory). See https://github.com/mfms-ncsu/galant