  In this work we consider balanced Schnyder woods for planar graphs, which are
Schnyder woods where the number of incoming edges of each color at each vertex
is balanced as much as possible. We provide a simple linear-time heuristic
leading to obtain well balanced Schnyder woods in practice. As test
applications we consider two important algorithmic problems: the computation of
Schnyder drawings and of small cycle separators. While not being able to
provide theoretical guarantees, our experimental results (on a wide collection
of planar graphs) suggest that the use of balanced Schnyder woods leads to an
improvement of the quality of the layout of Schnyder drawings, and provides an
efficient tool for computing short and balanced cycle separators.
