2-Visibility drawings of planar graphs

In a 2-visibility drawing the vertices of a given graph are represented by rectangular boxes and the adjacency relations are expressed by horizontal and vertical lines drawn between the boxes. In this paper we want to emphasize this model as a practical alternative to other representations of graphs, and to demonstrate the quality of the produced drawings. We give several approaches, heuristics as well as provably good algorithms, to represent planar graphs within this model. To this, we present a polynomial time algorithm to compute a bend-minimum orthogonal drawing under the restriction that the number of bends at each edge is at most 1.