Self-Approaching Graphs

Soroush Alamdari; Timothy M. Chan; Elyot Grant; Anna Lubiw; Vinayak Pathak

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arXiv · 1306.5460

Self-Approaching Graphs

Soroush Alamdari·Timothy M. Chan·Elyot Grant·Anna Lubiw·Vinayak Pathak

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Abstract

In this paper we introduce self-approaching graph drawings. A straight-line drawing of a graph is self-approaching if, for any origin vertex s and any destination vertex t, there is an st-path in the graph such that, for any point q on the path, as a point p moves continuously along the path from the origin to q, the Euclidean distance from p to q is always decreasing. This is a more stringent condition than a greedy drawing (where only the distance between vertices on the path and the destination vertex must decrease), and guarantees that the drawing is a 5.33-spanner. We study three topics: (1) recognizing self-approaching drawings; (2) constructing self-approaching drawings of a given graph; (3) constructing a self-approaching Steiner network connecting a given set of points. We show that: (1) there are efficient algorithms to test if a polygonal path is self-approaching in R^2 and R^3, but it is NP-hard to test if a given graph drawing in R^3 has a self-approaching uv-path; (2) we can characterize the trees that have self-approaching drawings; (3) for any given set of terminal points in the plane, we can find a linear sized network that has a self-approaching path between any ordered pair of terminals.

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BibTeX RIS

Soroush Alamdari, Timothy M. Chan, Elyot Grant, Anna Lubiw, Vinayak Pathak. 2013-06-23. Self-Approaching Graphs. https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.5460

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