230 research outputs found
Simple Approximations of Semialgebraic Sets and their Applications to Control
Many uncertainty sets encountered in control systems analysis and design can
be expressed in terms of semialgebraic sets, that is as the intersection of
sets described by means of polynomial inequalities. Important examples are for
instance the solution set of linear matrix inequalities or the Schur/Hurwitz
stability domains. These sets often have very complicated shapes (non-convex,
and even non-connected), which renders very difficult their manipulation. It is
therefore of considerable importance to find simple-enough approximations of
these sets, able to capture their main characteristics while maintaining a low
level of complexity. For these reasons, in the past years several convex
approximations, based for instance on hyperrect-angles, polytopes, or
ellipsoids have been proposed. In this work, we move a step further, and
propose possibly non-convex approximations , based on a small volume polynomial
superlevel set of a single positive polynomial of given degree. We show how
these sets can be easily approximated by minimizing the L1 norm of the
polynomial over the semialgebraic set, subject to positivity constraints.
Intuitively, this corresponds to the trace minimization heuristic commonly
encounter in minimum volume ellipsoid problems. From a computational viewpoint,
we design a hierarchy of linear matrix inequality problems to generate these
approximations, and we provide theoretically rigorous convergence results, in
the sense that the hierarchy of outer approximations converges in volume (or,
equivalently, almost everywhere and almost uniformly) to the original set. Two
main applications of the proposed approach are considered. The first one aims
at reconstruction/approximation of sets from a finite number of samples. In the
second one, we show how the concept of polynomial superlevel set can be used to
generate samples uniformly distributed on a given semialgebraic set. The
efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated by different numerical
examples
A unified framework for solving a general class of conditional and robust set-membership estimation problems
In this paper we present a unified framework for solving a general class of
problems arising in the context of set-membership estimation/identification
theory. More precisely, the paper aims at providing an original approach for
the computation of optimal conditional and robust projection estimates in a
nonlinear estimation setting where the operator relating the data and the
parameter to be estimated is assumed to be a generic multivariate polynomial
function and the uncertainties affecting the data are assumed to belong to
semialgebraic sets. By noticing that the computation of both the conditional
and the robust projection optimal estimators requires the solution to min-max
optimization problems that share the same structure, we propose a unified
two-stage approach based on semidefinite-relaxation techniques for solving such
estimation problems. The key idea of the proposed procedure is to recognize
that the optimal functional of the inner optimization problems can be
approximated to any desired precision by a multivariate polynomial function by
suitably exploiting recently proposed results in the field of parametric
optimization. Two simulation examples are reported to show the effectiveness of
the proposed approach.Comment: Accpeted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic
Control (2014
Copositive certificates of non-negativity for polynomials on semialgebraic sets
A certificate of non-negativity is a way to write a given function so that
its non-negativity becomes evident. Certificates of non-negativity are
fundamental tools in optimization, and they underlie powerful algorithmic
techniques for various types of optimization problems. We propose certificates
of non-negativity of polynomials based on copositive polynomials. The
certificates we obtain are valid for generic semialgebraic sets and have a
fixed small degree, while commonly used sums-of-squares (SOS) certificates are
guaranteed to be valid only for compact semialgebraic sets and could have large
degree. Optimization over the cone of copositive polynomials is not tractable,
but this cone has been well studied. The main benefit of our copositive
certificates of non-negativity is their ability to translate results known
exclusively for copositive polynomials to more general semialgebraic sets. In
particular, we show how to use copositive polynomials to construct structured
(e.g., sparse) certificates of non-negativity, even for unstructured
semialgebraic sets. Last but not least, copositive certificates can be used to
obtain not only hierarchies of tractable lower bounds, but also hierarchies of
tractable upper bounds for polynomial optimization problems.Comment: 27 pages, 1 figur
Optimization of Lyapunov Invariants in Verification of Software Systems
The paper proposes a control-theoretic framework for verification of numerical software systems, and puts forward software verification as an important application of control and systems theory. The idea is to transfer Lyapunov functions and the associated computational techniques from control systems analysis and convex optimization to verification of various software safety and performance specifications. These include but are not limited to absence of overflow, absence of division-by-zero, termination in finite time, absence of dead-code, and certain user-specified assertions. Central to this framework are Lyapunov invariants. These are properly constructed functions of the program variables, and satisfy certain properties-analogous to those of Lyapunov functions-along the execution trace. The search for the invariants can be formulated as a convex optimization problem. If the associated optimization problem is feasible, the result is a certificate for the specification.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CNS-1135955)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CPS-1135843)United States. Army Research Office. Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (Award W911NF-11-1-0046)United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant/Cooperative Agreement NNX12AM52A
The Geometry of SDP-Exactness in Quadratic Optimization
Consider the problem of minimizing a quadratic objective subject to quadratic
equations. We study the semialgebraic region of objective functions for which
this problem is solved by its semidefinite relaxation. For the Euclidean
distance problem, this is a bundle of spectrahedral shadows surrounding the
given variety. We characterize the algebraic boundary of this region and we
derive a formula for its degree.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figure
- …