Automatic Layout and Label Management for Compact UML Sequence Diagrams

Sequence diagrams belong to the most commonly used UML diagrams. There is research on desirable aesthetics, but to our knowledge no layout algorithms have been published. This might be due to the rigid specification of sequence diagrams that seems to make laying them out quite easy. However, as we argue here, naive algorithms do not always produce desirable solutions. We present methods to produce compact layouts which we have implemented in a layout algorithm and evaluate them with 50 real-world sequence diagrams.

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