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Since networks continue to grow at a rapid pace and with greater complexity, to have an efficient network management system becomes more important than ever. The network topology display service is one of the essential services that Configuration Management provides. For most existing network management systems, this service is supported by either an X-window based drawing tool or an automatic detection and drawing procedure. When the network grows larger and becomes more complicate, user must spend a great deal of time in adjusting network devices’ ICON, so as to get a good graphic layout. How to acquire a symmetric network topology display is called the Network Topology Display Problem (NTDP). Usually, NTDP is solved by a two-step procedure. In the first step, Intra-subnetwork algorithms are developed according to the types of the subnetwork. such as Ring、Bus etc.. In the second step, the inter-subnetworks algorithm is used to adjust the relative position between subnetworks. A Heuristic method had been proposed to handle the inter-subnetworks display problem. However, this method has difficulties in solving large size problems. The purpose of this paper is to find an efficient and effectiveness inter-subnetworks algorithm. Three methods, Modified Heuristic Method、Operations Research Method, and Neural Network Methods, are proposed Computational results obtained from these four methods are analyzed with respect to their effectiveness, running speed, and complexity. From the analysis, the following conclusions can be drawn. The Modified Heuristic Method performs best when the number of subnetworks is less than 50. However, once the number of subnetworks is over 50, the Operations Research Method has the best result in both running time and effectiveness.
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