Methods for Visual Understanding of Hierarchical System Structures

1981/01/01 by Kozo Sugiyama, Shojiro Tagawa, Mitsuhiko Toda · 1,238 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Engineering · Social Sciences · #Algorithm #Artificial intelligence #Computer science #Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics #Facility Location and Emergency Management #Heuristic #Readability #Theoretical computer science #Transportation Planning and Optimization

paper · doi:10.1109/tsmc.1981.4308636

published in IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics 11(2), 109-125 (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)

openalex publication_date 1981/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25

Abstract

Two kinds of new methods are developed to obtain effective representations of hierarchies automatically: theoretical and heuristic methods. The methods determine the positions of vertices in two steps. First the order of the vertices in each level is determined to reduce the number of crossings of edges. Then horizontal positions of the vertices are determined to improve further the readability of drawings. The theoretical methods are useful in recognizing the nature of the problem, and the heuristic methods make it possible to enlarge the size of hierarchies with which we can deal. Performance tests of the heuristic methods and several applications are presented.

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