Abstract:
Engineers and scientists are constantly dealing with increasingly complex models that require suitable mathematical frameworks to describe them. While graphs are commonly used to represent complex systems, maps and hypermaps are more general structures useful for representing and analyzing geometric objects, thanks to additional basic elements that graphs lack, such as faces. In this research, a novel method for constructing maps using hypermap grammar is proposed. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on vertices and edges to define submaps, this method utilizes vertices and faces to identify and manipulate structures with greater flexibility, since faces play a crucial role in defining maps, especially when they are planar. Our grammar is shown to be effective in both understanding and detecting the structure of the generated maps. By employing a single production rule, the new hypermap grammar generates planar k-tree maps (where k = 1, 2, or 3). The findings suggest that the new hypermap grammar presented in this research has the potential to be a valuable tool for examining the properties and structure of planar maps, with potential applications in diverse fields such as computer science, topology, and graph theory.