force-directed positioning inside circular sector and avoid edge overlaps

[miromarchi]

In my PhD project I've used this great layout algorithm to display a network from the point of view of one node (as if it was an ego-network). Me and my collaborators have manually assigned a numeral attribute field to each node, containing the number of orbit we wanted the node to be placed in. Then we applied your layout and we got the beautiful layered display. You can see the result here

Then we wanted to maintain the force-directed placement, in order to limit edge overlapping and to have related nodes close to each other in the same circular sector. Since we had no java programming skills in the group we did it manually, dragging nodes in places. But we thought your algorithm could be enhanced to do this and that others would find it useful. So, here is our fearure request.

Feature request: inside each orbit the nodes should move to the position which produce the less edge overlapping and maintain the nodes near their neighbors through orbits.

We hope this is a good idea. What do you think about it? Thanks