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arXiv · 1911.00612

Computing Circle Packing Representations of Planar Graphs

Sally Dong·Yin Tat Lee·Kent Quanrud
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Abstract

The Circle Packing Theorem states that every planar graph can be represented as the tangency graph of a family of internally-disjoint circles. A well-known generalization is the Primal-Dual Circle Packing Theorem for 3-connected planar graphs. The existence of these representations has widespread applications in theoretical computer science and mathematics; however, the algorithmic aspect has received relatively little attention. In this work, we present an algorithm based on convex optimization for computing a primal-dual circle packing representation of maximal planar graphs, i.e. triangulations. This in turn gives an algorithm for computing a circle packing representation of any planar graph. Both take $\widetilde{O}(n \log(R/\varepsilon))$ expected run-time to produce a solution that is $\varepsilon$ close to a true representation, where $R$ is the ratio between the maximum and minimum circle radius in the true representation.

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Sally Dong, Yin Tat Lee, Kent Quanrud. 2019-11-01. Computing Circle Packing Representations of Planar Graphs. https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.00612

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