PSOGD: A New Method for Graph Drawing

Force-directed graph drawing algorithms compute a layout as the equilibrium of a physical system. This equilibrium is an optimum of the corresponding objective function. We propose a new method for drawing undirected graphs that uses particle swarm optimization (PSO). The graph is initialized with a swarm of random particles. The position vector of each particle corresponds to one layout of the graph. The objective function maps the layout into a real number representing the energy of the layout which is obtained by calculating the attractive and repulsive forces between the vertices. All particles automatically update their position and velocity to find the optimal layout until the algorithm terminates. PSO makes the implementation of the algorithm simple and easy. We empirically and comparatively evaluate the performance of the algorithm.