Automatic Visualisation of Metro Maps 1 Seok-Hee Hong a , Damian Merrick a,∗ , Hugo A. D. do Nascimento b a School of Information Technologies, University of Sydney, Australia and National ICT Australia 2 b Instituto de Inform´atica, Universidade Federal de Goi´as, Brazil Abstract We investigate the new problem of automatic metro map layout. In general, a metro map consists of a set of lines which have intersections or overlaps. We define a set of aesthetic criteria for good metro map layouts and present a method to produce such layouts automatically. Our method uses a variation of the spring algorithm with a suitable preprocessing step. The experimental results with real world data sets show that our method produces good metro map layouts quickly. 1 Introduction The metro map is a well-known type of diagram that is widely used in illus- trating transportation networks. Metro maps incorporate a carefully balanced trade-off between geographical accuracy and ease of understanding of the net- work. Traditionally, metro maps are drawn manually, without the assistance of automated methods. The Sydney Cityrail network, an example of a railway network drawn in the metro map style, is shown in Figure 1 [23]. In addition to the depiction of transportation networks, the metro map metaphor has been used successfully for visualising abstract information, where no geog- ∗ Corresponding author. Address: IMAGEN Program, National ICT Australia, Bay 15, Australian Technology Park, Eveleigh NSW 1430, Australia. Email addresses: shhong@it.usyd.edu.au (Seok-Hee Hong), dmerrick@it.usyd.edu.au (Damian Merrick), hadn@inf.ufg.br (Hugo A. D. do Nascimento). 1 Preliminary versions of this paper were published in [10,11] 2 National ICT Australia is funded by the Australian Government’s Backing Aus- tralia’s Ability initiative, in part through the Australian Research Council. Preprint submitted to Elsevier Science 7 June 2005