arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Michael Jünger.
This is a short description of our solver OSCM submitted by our team MPPEG to the PACE 2024 challenge both for the exact track and the parameterized track, available at https://github.com/pauljngr/PACE2024 and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11546972.
Storyline drawings are a popular visualization of interactions of a set of characters over time, e.g., to show participants of scenes in a book or movie. Characters are represented as $x$-monotone curves that converge vertically for interactions and diverge otherwise. Combinatorially, the task of computing storyline drawings reduces to finding a sequence of permutations of the character curves for the different time points, with the primary objective being crossing minimization of the induced character trajectories. In this paper, we revisit exact integer linear programming (ILP) approaches for this NP-hard problem. By enriching previous formulations with additional problem-specific insights and new heuristics, we obtain exact solutions for an extended new benchmark set of larger and more complex instances than had been used before. Our experiments show that our enriched formulations lead to better performing algorithms when compared to state-of-the-art modelling techniques. In particular, our best algorithms are on average 2.6-3.2 times faster than the state-of-the-art and succeed in solving complex instances that could not be solved before within the given time limit. Further, we show in an ablation study that our enrichment components contribute considerably to the performance of the new ILP formulation.
In this article we explore a symplectic packing problem where the targets and domains are $2n$-dimensional symplectic manifolds. We work in the context where the manifolds have first homology group equal to $\mathbb{Z}^n$, and we require the embeddings to induce isomorphisms between first homology groups. In this case, Maley, Mastrangeli and Traynor showed that the problem can be reduced to a combinatorial optimization problem, namely packing certain allowable simplices into a given standard simplex. They designed a computer program and presented computational results. In particular, they determined the simplex packing widths in dimension four for up to $k=12$ simplices, along with lower bounds for higher values of $k$. We present a modified algorithmic approach that allows us to determine the $k$-simplex packing widths for up to $k = 13$ simplices in dimension four and up to $k = 8$ simplices in dimension six. Moreover, our approach determines all simplex-multisets that allow for optimal packings.
We consider the coordinate assignment phase of the well known Sugiyama framework for drawing directed graphs in a hierarchical style. The extensive literature in this area has given comparatively little attention to a prescribed width of the drawing. We present a minimum cost flow formulation that supports prescribed width and optionally other criteria like lower and upper bounds on the distance of neighbouring nodes in a layer or enforced vertical edges segments. In our experiments we demonstrate that our approach can compete with state-of-the-art algorithms.
Compacting orthogonal drawings is a challenging task. Usually algorithms try to compute drawings with small area or edge length while preserving the underlying orthogonal shape. We present a one-dimensional compaction algorithm that alters the orthogonal shape of edges for better geometric results. An experimental evaluation shows that we were able to reduce the total edge length and the drawing area, but at the expense of additional bends.
A storyline visualization is a layout that represents the temporal dynamics of social interactions along time by the convergence of chronological lines. Among the criteria oriented at improving aesthetics and legibility of a representation of this type, a small number of line crossings is the hardest to achieve. We model the crossing minimization in the storyline visualization problem as a multi-layer crossing minimization problem with tree constraints. Our algorithm can compute a layout with the minimum number of crossings of the chronological lines. Computational results demonstrate that it can solve instances with more than 100 interactions and with more than 100 chronological lines to optimality.