Crossing-Optimal Extension of Simple Drawings

Abstract

In extension problems of partial graph drawings one is given an incomplete drawing of an input graph G and is asked to complete the drawing while maintaining certain properties. A prominent area where such problems arise is that of crossing minimization. For plane drawings and various relaxations of these, there is a number of tractability as well as lower-bound results exploring the computational complexity of crossing-sensitive drawing extension problems. In contrast, comparatively few results are known on extension problems for the fundamental and broad class of simple drawings, that is, drawings in which each pair of edges intersects in at most one point. In fact, the extension problem of simple drawings has only recently been shown to be NP-hard even for inserting a single edge.
In this paper we present tractability results for the crossing-sensitive extension problem of simple drawings. In particular, we show that the problem of inserting edges into a simple drawing is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the number of edges to insert and an upper bound on newly created crossings. Using the same proof techniques, we are also able to answer several closely related variants of this problem, among others the extension problem for k-plane drawings. Moreover, using a different approach, we provide a single-exponential fixed-parameter algorithm for the case in which we are only trying to insert a single edge into the drawing.