Treedecomposition of geometric constraint graphs based on computing graph circuits

Abstract

The graph-based geometric constraint solving technique works in two steps. First the geometric problem is translated into a graph whose vertices represent the set of geometric elements and whose edges are the constraints. Then the constraint problem is solved by decomposing the graph into a collection of subgraphs each representing a standard problem which is solved by a dedicated equational solver. In this work we report on an algorithm to decompose biconnected tree-decomposable graphs representing either underor wellconstrained 2D geometric constraint problems. The algorithm recursively first computes a set of fundamental circuits in the graph then splits the graph into a set of subgraphs each sharing exactly three vertices with the fundamental circuit. Practical experiments show that the reported algorithm clearly outperforms the treedecomposition approach based on identifying subgraphs by applying specific decomposition rules.