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In the context of methodologies intended to confer robustness to geometric algorithms, we elaborate on the exact-computation paradigm and formalize the notion of degree of a geometric algorithm as a worst-case quantification of the precision (number of bits) to which arithmetic calculation have to be executed in order to guarantee topological correctness. We also propose a formalism for the expeditious evaluation of algorithmic degree. As an application of this paradigm and an illustration of our general approach where algorithm design is driven also by the degree, we consider the important classical problem of proximity queries in two and three dimensions and develop a new technique for the efficient and robust execution of such queries based on an implicit representation of Voronoi diagrams. Our new technique offers both low degree and fast query time and for 2D queries is optimal with respect to both cost measures of the paradigm, asymptotic number of operations, and arithmetic degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A digraph is upward planar if it admits a planar drawing where all edges are monotone in the upward direction. It is known that the problem of testing a digraph for upward planarity is NP-complete in general. This paper describes an O(n4)-time upward planarity testing algorithm for all digraphs that have a series-parallel structure, where n is the number of vertices of the input. This significantly enlarges the family of digraphs for which a polynomial-time testing algorithm is known. Furthermore, the study is extended to general digraphs, and a fixed parameter tractable algorithm for upward planarity testing is described, whose time complexity is O(dt · t · n3 + d · t2 · n + d2 · n2) where t is the number of triconnected components of the digraph and d is an upper bound on the diameter of any split component of the digraph. Our results use the new notion of upward spirality that, informally speaking, is a measure of the "level of winding" that a triconnected component of a digraph G can have in an upward planar drawing of G. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]