A new planarity test

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Given an undirected graph, the planarity testing problem is to determine whether the graph can be drawn in a plane without any crossing edges. Linear time planarity testing algorithms have previously been designed by Hopcroft and Tarjan, and by Booth and Lueker. However, their approaches are quite involved. Several other approaches have also been developed for simplifying the planarity test. In this paper, we developed a very simple linear time testing algorithm based only on a depth-first search tree. When the given graph is not planar, our algorithm immediately produces explicit Kuratowski's subgraphs. A new data structure, PC-trees, is introduced, which can be viewed as abstract subembeddings of actual planar embeddings. A graph-reduction technique is adopted so that the embeddings for the planar biconnected components constructed at each iteration never have to be changed. The recognition and embedding are actually done simultaneously in our algorithm (Booth and Lueker, 1976). The implementation of our algorithm is quite straightforward.