1,352 research outputs found
Inexactness of the Hydro-Thermal Coordination Semidefinite Relaxation
Hydro-thermal coordination is the problem of determining the optimal economic
dispatch of hydro and thermal power plants over time. The physics of
hydroelectricity generation is commonly simplified in the literature to account
for its fundamentally nonlinear nature. Advances in convex relaxation theory
have allowed the advent of Shor's semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations of
quadratic models of the problem. This paper shows how a recently published SDP
relaxation is only exact if a very strict condition regarding turbine
efficiency is observed, failing otherwise. It further proposes the use of a set
of convex envelopes as a strategy to successfully obtain a stricter lower bound
of the optimal solution. This strategy is combined with a standard iterative
convex-concave procedure to recover a stationary point of the original
non-convex problem.Comment: Submitted to IEEE PES General Meeting 201
Interior-point solver for convex separable block-angular problems
Constraints matrices with block-angular structures are pervasive in Optimization. Interior-point methods have shown to be competitive for these structured problems by exploiting the linear algebra. One of these approaches solved the normal equations using sparse Cholesky factorizations for the block constraints, and a preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) for the linking constraints. The preconditioner is based on a power series expansion which approximates the inverse of the matrix of the linking constraints system. In this work we present an efficient solver based on this algorithm. Some of its features are: it solves linearly constrained convex separable problems (linear, quadratic or nonlinear); both Newton and second-order predictor-corrector directions can be used, either with the Cholesky+PCG scheme or with a Cholesky factorization of normal equations; the preconditioner
may include any number of terms of the power series; for any number of these terms, it estimates the spectral radius of the matrix in the power series (which is instrumental for the quality of the precondi-
tioner). The solver has been hooked to SML, a structure-conveying modelling language based on the popular AMPL modeling language. Computational results are reported for some large and/or difficult instances in the literature: (1) multicommodity flow problems; (2) minimum congestion problems; (3) statistical data protection problems using l1 and l2 distances (which are linear and quadratic problems, respectively), and the pseudo-Huber function, a nonlinear approximation to l1 which improves the preconditioner. In the largest instances, of up to 25 millions of variables and 300000 constraints, this approach is from two to three orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art linear and quadratic optimization solvers.Preprin
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