Improved analysis of algorithms based on supporting halfspaces and quadratic programming for the convex intersection and feasibility problems

This paper improves the algorithms based on supporting halfspaces and quadratic programming for convex set intersection problems in our earlier paper in several directions. First, we give conditions so that much smaller quadratic programs (QPs) and approximate projections arising from partially solving the QPs are sufficient for multiple-term superlinear convergence for nonsmooth problems. Second, we identify additional regularity, which we call the second order supporting hyperplane property (SOSH), that gives multiple-term quadratic convergence. Third, we show that these fast convergence results carry over for the convex inequality problem. Fourth, we show that infeasibility can be detected in finitely many operations. Lastly, we explain how we can use the dual active set QP algorithm of Goldfarb and Idnani to get useful iterates by solving the QPs partially, overcoming the problem of solving large QPs in our algorithms.Comment: 27 pages, 2 figure

OSQP: An Operator Splitting Solver for Quadratic Programs

We present a general-purpose solver for convex quadratic programs based on the alternating direction method of multipliers, employing a novel operator splitting technique that requires the solution of a quasi-definite linear system with the same coefficient matrix at almost every iteration. Our algorithm is very robust, placing no requirements on the problem data such as positive definiteness of the objective function or linear independence of the constraint functions. It can be configured to be division-free once an initial matrix factorization is carried out, making it suitable for real-time applications in embedded systems. In addition, our technique is the first operator splitting method for quadratic programs able to reliably detect primal and dual infeasible problems from the algorithm iterates. The method also supports factorization caching and warm starting, making it particularly efficient when solving parametrized problems arising in finance, control, and machine learning. Our open-source C implementation OSQP has a small footprint, is library-free, and has been extensively tested on many problem instances from a wide variety of application areas. It is typically ten times faster than competing interior-point methods, and sometimes much more when factorization caching or warm start is used. OSQP has already shown a large impact with tens of thousands of users both in academia and in large corporations

Construction of power flow feasibility sets

We develop a new approach for construction of convex analytically simple regions where the AC power flow equations are guaranteed to have a feasible solutions. Construction of these regions is based on efficient semidefinite programming techniques accelerated via sparsity exploiting algorithms. Resulting regions have a simple geometric shape in the space of power injections (polytope or ellipsoid) and can be efficiently used for assessment of system security in the presence of uncertainty. Efficiency and tightness of the approach is validated on a number of test networks