5 research outputs found
Optimal co-design of control, scheduling and routing in multi-hop control networks
A Multi-hop Control Network consists of a plant where the communication
between sensors, actuators and computational units is supported by a (wireless)
multi-hop communication network, and data flow is performed using scheduling
and routing of sensing and actuation data. Given a SISO LTI plant, we will
address the problem of co-designing a digital controller and the network
parameters (scheduling and routing) in order to guarantee stability and
maximize a performance metric on the transient response to a step input, with
constraints on the control effort, on the output overshoot and on the bandwidth
of the communication channel. We show that the above optimization problem is a
polynomial optimization problem, which is generally NP-hard. We provide
sufficient conditions on the network topology, scheduling and routing such that
it is computationally feasible, namely such that it reduces to a convex
optimization problem.Comment: 51st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2012. Accepted for
publication as regular pape
A Complete Characterization of the Gap between Convexity and SOS-Convexity
Our first contribution in this paper is to prove that three natural sum of
squares (sos) based sufficient conditions for convexity of polynomials, via the
definition of convexity, its first order characterization, and its second order
characterization, are equivalent. These three equivalent algebraic conditions,
henceforth referred to as sos-convexity, can be checked by semidefinite
programming whereas deciding convexity is NP-hard. If we denote the set of
convex and sos-convex polynomials in variables of degree with
and respectively, then our main
contribution is to prove that if and
only if or or . We also present a complete
characterization for forms (homogeneous polynomials) except for the case
which is joint work with G. Blekherman and is to be published
elsewhere. Our result states that the set of convex forms in
variables of degree equals the set of sos-convex forms if
and only if or or . To prove these results, we present
in particular explicit examples of polynomials in
and
and forms in
and , and a
general procedure for constructing forms in from nonnegative but not sos forms in variables and degree .
Although for disparate reasons, the remarkable outcome is that convex
polynomials (resp. forms) are sos-convex exactly in cases where nonnegative
polynomials (resp. forms) are sums of squares, as characterized by Hilbert.Comment: 25 pages; minor editorial revisions made; formal certificates for
computer assisted proofs of the paper added to arXi
NP-hardness of Deciding Convexity of Quartic Polynomials and Related Problems
We show that unless P=NP, there exists no polynomial time (or even
pseudo-polynomial time) algorithm that can decide whether a multivariate
polynomial of degree four (or higher even degree) is globally convex. This
solves a problem that has been open since 1992 when N. Z. Shor asked for the
complexity of deciding convexity for quartic polynomials. We also prove that
deciding strict convexity, strong convexity, quasiconvexity, and
pseudoconvexity of polynomials of even degree four or higher is strongly
NP-hard. By contrast, we show that quasiconvexity and pseudoconvexity of odd
degree polynomials can be decided in polynomial time.Comment: 20 page
A positive definite polynomial Hessian that does not factor
The notion of sos-convexity has recently been proposed as a tractable sufficient condition for convexity of polynomials based on a sum of squares decomposition of the Hessian matrix. A multivariate polynomial p(x) = p(x[subscript 1],...,x[subscript n])is said to be sos-convex if its Hessian H(x) can be factored as H(x) = M[superscript T](x)M(x) with a possibly nonsquare polynomial matrix M(x). The problem of deciding sos-convexity of a polynomial can be reduced to the feasibility of a semidefinite program, which can be checked efficiently. Motivated by this computational tractability, it has been speculated whether every convex polynomial must necessarily be sos-convex. In this paper, we answer this question in the negative by presenting an explicit example of a trivariate homogeneous polynomial of degree eight that is convex but not sos-convex
Algebraic Relaxations and Hardness Results in Polynomial Optimization and Lyapunov Analysis
This thesis settles a number of questions related to computational complexity
and algebraic, semidefinite programming based relaxations in optimization and
control.Comment: PhD Thesis, MIT, September, 201