  We present a novel certified and complete algorithm to compute arrangements
of real planar algebraic curves. It provides a geometric-topological analysis
of the decomposition of the plane induced by a finite number of algebraic
curves in terms of a cylindrical algebraic decomposition. From a high-level
perspective, the overall method splits into two main subroutines, namely an
algorithm denoted Bisolve to isolate the real solutions of a zero-dimensional
bivariate system, and an algorithm denoted GeoTop to analyze a single algebraic
curve.
  Compared to existing approaches based on elimination techniques, we
considerably improve the corresponding lifting steps in both subroutines. As a
result, generic position of the input system is never assumed, and thus our
algorithm never demands for any change of coordinates. In addition, we
significantly limit the types of involved exact operations, that is, we only
use resultant and gcd computations as purely symbolic operations. The latter
results are achieved by combining techniques from different fields such as
(modular) symbolic computation, numerical analysis and algebraic geometry.
  We have implemented our algorithms as prototypical contributions to the
C++-project CGAL. They exploit graphics hardware to expedite the symbolic
computations. We have also compared our implementation with the current
reference implementations, that is, LGP and Maple's Isolate for polynomial
system solving, and CGAL's bivariate algebraic kernel for analyses and
arrangement computations of algebraic curves. For various series of challenging
instances, our exhaustive experiments show that the new implementations
outperform the existing ones.
