Stress Majorization with Orthogonal Ordering Constraints

Force-directed placement is a widely used approach to automatically arranging the nodes and edges of a relational diagram or graph in an aesthetically pleasing manner. The adoption of the stress majorization method from multi-dimensional scaling into graph layout has provided an improved mathematical basis and better convergence properties for so-called "force-directed placement" techniques. In this paper we give an algorithm for augmenting such stress majorization techniques with orthogonal ordering constraints and we demonstrate several graph-drawing applications where this class of constrains can be very useful.