Drawing Subway Maps: A Survey

Abstract This paper deals with automating the drawing of subway maps. There are two features of schematic subway maps that make them different from drawings of other networks such as flow charts or organigrams. First, most schematic subway maps use not only horizontal and vertical lines, but also diagonals. This gives more flexibility in the layout process, but it also makes the problem provably hard. Second, a subway map represents a network whose components have geographic locations that are roughly known to the users of such a map. This knowledge must be respected during the search for a clear layout of the network. For the sake of visual clarity the underlying geography may be distorted, but it must not be given up, otherwise map users will be hopelessly confused. In this paper we first give a rather generally accepted list of rules that should be adhered to by a good subway map. Next we survey three recent methods for drawing subway maps, analyze their performance with respect...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: IFE
• Authors: Alexander Wolff
• Keywords: IFE 2007, Schematic Subway, Subway, Subway Maps