Topological morphing of planar graphs

In this paper we analyze the relationships among different planar embeddings of the same graph and study how two planar embeddings can be morphed one into the other with the minimum number of elementary changes, while preserving the mental map of the user. We call this problem Topological Morphing, in analogy with the well-known Geometric Morphing problem, in which it is studied how two planar drawings can be morphed one into the other with the minimum number of elementary changes. First, we define two operations, called flip and skip, describing natural transformations of a graph embedding that preserve the mental map of the user. Then, we study the problem of performing a morph while minimizing the number of these operations. We show that the Topological Morphing problem is NP-hard for biconnected planar graphs, we give polynomial-time algorithms for some restricted versions of the problem, and, based on such polynomial-time algorithms, we give a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm for the general case. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.