Aesthetics-based Graph Layout for Human Consumption

Automatic graph layout is an important and long‐studied problem. The basic straight‐edge graph layout problem is to find spatial positions for the nodes of an input graph that maximize some measure of desirability. When graph layout is intended for human consumption, we call this measure of desirability an aesthetic. We seek an algorithm that produces graph layouts of high aesthetic quality not only for general graphs, but also for specific classes of graphs, such as trees and directed acyclic graphs. The Aesthetic Graph Layout (AGLO) approach described in this paper models graph layout as a multiobjective optimization problem, where the value of a layout is determined by multiple user‐controlled layout aesthetics. The current AGLO algorithm combines the power and flexibility of the simulated annealing approach of Davidson and Harel (1989) with the relative speed of the method of Fruchterman and Reingold (1991). In addition, it is more general, and incorporates several new layout aesthetics to support new layout styles. Using these aesthetics, we are able to produce pleasing displays for graphs on which these other methods flounder.