Drawing Simultaneously Embedded Graphs with Few Bends

Abstract

We study the problem of drawing simultaneously embedded graphs with few bends. We show that for any simultaneous embedding with fixed edges (SEFE) of two graphs, there exists a corresponding drawing realizing this embedding such that common edges are drawn as straight-line segments and each exclusive edge has a constant number of bends. If the common graph is biconnected and induced, a straight-line drawing exists. This yields the first efficient testing algorithm for simultaneous geometric embedding (SGE) for a non-trivial class of graphs.