Connected and disconnected

Planar and nonplanar graphs

Electrical engineering (circuit block diagrams)

Industrial engineering (schematic design diagrams, equipment/resource control charts)

Business processing (entity relation diagrams)

Software management/software (re-)engineering (data inspector diagrams)

Database and knowledge engineering (sociology, genealogy)

CASE tools (design diagrams)

Reshapes the links of a graph in either an “orthogonal” or a “direct” style, without moving the nodes.

Efficient, scalable algorithm.

The shapes of the links are computed in such a way as to reduce the number of link-to-link and link-to-node crossings.

Supports links with different widths.

Automatically arranges the final segments of the links (the segments near the origin or destination node) to obtain a “bundle” of parallel links.

Allows you to specify which side of the node (top, bottom, left, or right) a link can be connected to.

Supports self-links (that is, links with the same origin and destination node).

Supports multiple links (that is, more than one link between the same origin and destination nodes).

Allows you to specify “pinned” (fixed) links that the layout algorithm cannot reshape.

Link-to-link and link-to-node crossings cannot always be avoided, especially in highly connected graphs with links between distant nodes. This limitation is closely related to the efficiency issues of this intrinsically complex layout problem.