Heuristic layout algorithms for network management presentation services

It has been shown that the general activity of managing a complex network can be made more tractable by providing the operator with a rich, user-friendly set of presentation services. The problem of converting the logical description of a large computer network to a pictorial representation, assuming that computer networks in general can be represented by undirected graphs, translates to finding algorithms that will be able to process a suitable description of a general graph structure and produce a reasonable picture of it on a presentation medium. An approach is presented that uses the divide-and-conquer principle: a preprocessing step called heuristic clustering is used to partition a large network into logical groups, and a multiphase placement algorithm is used to produce coordinates for the nodes. The algorithms used for clustering and node placement are described, with emphasis on the heuristics that have been used in each step.<>