ACG-adjacent constraint graph for general floorplans

ACG (adjacent constraint graph) is invented as a general floorplan representation. It has advantages of both adjacency graph and constraint graph of a floorplan: edges in an ACG are between modules close to each other, thus the physical distance of two modules can be measured directly in the graph; since an ACG is a constraint graph, the floorplan area and module positions can be simply found by longest path computations. A natural combination of horizontal and vertical relations within one graph renders a beautiful data structure with full symmetry. The direct correspondence between geometrical positions of modules and ACG structures also makes it easy to incrementally change a floorplan and evaluate the result. Experimental results show the superiority of this representation.