Complex Management Techniques Research Articles

Efficient methods and readily customizable libraries for managing complexity of large networks.

BackgroundOne common problem in visualizing real-life networks, including biological pathways, is the large size of these networks. Often times, users find themselves facing slow, non-scaling operations due to network size, if not a “hairball” network, hindering effective analysis. One extremely useful method for reducing complexity of large networks is the use of hierarchical clustering and nesting, and applying expand-collapse operations on demand during analysis. Another such method is hiding currently unnecessary details, to later gradually reveal on demand. Major challenges when applying complexity reduction operations on large networks include efficiency and maintaining the user’s mental map of the drawing.ResultsWe developed specialized incremental layout methods for preserving a user’s mental map while managing complexity of large networks through expand-collapse and hide-show operations. We also developed open-source JavaScript libraries as plug-ins to the web based graph visualization library named Cytsocape.js to implement these methods as complexity management operations. Through efficient specialized algorithms provided by these extensions, one can collapse or hide desired parts of a network, yielding potentially much smaller networks, making them more suitable for interactive visual analysis.ConclusionThis work fills an important gap by making efficient implementations of some already known complexity management techniques freely available to tool developers through a couple of open source, customizable software libraries, and by introducing some heuristics which can be applied upon such complexity management techniques to ensure preserving mental map of users.

DARAL: A Dynamic and Adaptive Routing Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

The evolution of Smart City projects is pushing researchers and companies to develop more efficient embedded hardware and also more efficient communication technologies. These communication technologies are the focus of this work, presenting a new routing algorithm based on dynamically-allocated sub-networks and node roles. Among these features, our algorithm presents a fast set-up time, a reduced overhead and a hierarchical organization, which allows for the application of complex management techniques. This work presents a routing algorithm based on a dynamically-allocated hierarchical clustering, which uses the link quality indicator as a reference parameter, maximizing the network coverage and minimizing the control message overhead and the convergence time. The present work based its test scenario and analysis in the density measure, considered as a node degree. The routing algorithm is compared with some of the most well known routing algorithms for different scenario densities.

A multi-graph approach to complexity management in interactive graph visualization

In this paper we describe a new, multi-graph approach for development of a comprehensive set of complexity management techniques for interactive graph visualization tools. This framework facilitates efficient implementation of management of multiple associated graphs with navigation links and nesting of graphs as well as ghosting, folding and hiding of unwanted graph elements. The theoretical analyses show that the involved data structures and operations on them are quite efficient, and an implementation in a graph drawing tool has proven to be successful.

Graph visualization toolkits

The authors have created two toolkits that allow developers to easily integrate graph visualization capabilities into custom software applications. The Graph Layout Toolkit (GLT) provides interfaces for modeling, drawing, and automatically laying out graphs. The Graph Editing Toolkit (GET) provides a customizable display and editing layer, which facilitates rapidly developing tools that visualize data in the form of graphs. The authors present an architectural overview of these tools and discuss the challenges encountered during implementation and integration of theory and research results into such tools, In particular, they discuss automatic graph layout and labeling algorithms and complexity management techniques. In addition, they present examples of applications using these tools.