85,550 research outputs found
On the Convergence Time of a Natural Dynamics for Linear Programming
We consider a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations for the solution of linear programming (LP) problems that was first proposed in the mathematical biology literature as a model for the foraging behavior of acellular slime mold Physarum polycephalum, and more recently considered as a method to solve LP instances. We study the convergence time of the continuous Physarum dynamics in the context of the linear programming problem, and derive a new time bound to approximate optimality that depends on the relative entropy between projected versions of the optimal point and of the initial point. The bound scales logarithmically with the LP cost coefficients and linearly with the inverse of the relative accuracy, establishing the efficiency of the dynamics for arbitrary LP instances with positive costs
Successive Convexification of Non-Convex Optimal Control Problems and Its Convergence Properties
This paper presents an algorithm to solve non-convex optimal control
problems, where non-convexity can arise from nonlinear dynamics, and non-convex
state and control constraints. This paper assumes that the state and control
constraints are already convex or convexified, the proposed algorithm
convexifies the nonlinear dynamics, via a linearization, in a successive
manner. Thus at each succession, a convex optimal control subproblem is solved.
Since the dynamics are linearized and other constraints are convex, after a
discretization, the subproblem can be expressed as a finite dimensional convex
programming subproblem. Since convex optimization problems can be solved very
efficiently, especially with custom solvers, this subproblem can be solved in
time-critical applications, such as real-time path planning for autonomous
vehicles. Several safe-guarding techniques are incorporated into the algorithm,
namely virtual control and trust regions, which add another layer of
algorithmic robustness. A convergence analysis is presented in continuous- time
setting. By doing so, our convergence results will be independent from any
numerical schemes used for discretization. Numerical simulations are performed
for an illustrative trajectory optimization example.Comment: Updates: corrected wordings for LICQ. This is the full version. A
brief version of this paper is published in 2016 IEEE 55th Conference on
Decision and Control (CDC). http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7798816
Robust distributed linear programming
This paper presents a robust, distributed algorithm to solve general linear
programs. The algorithm design builds on the characterization of the solutions
of the linear program as saddle points of a modified Lagrangian function. We
show that the resulting continuous-time saddle-point algorithm is provably
correct but, in general, not distributed because of a global parameter
associated with the nonsmooth exact penalty function employed to encode the
inequality constraints of the linear program. This motivates the design of a
discontinuous saddle-point dynamics that, while enjoying the same convergence
guarantees, is fully distributed and scalable with the dimension of the
solution vector. We also characterize the robustness against disturbances and
link failures of the proposed dynamics. Specifically, we show that it is
integral-input-to-state stable but not input-to-state stable. The latter fact
is a consequence of a more general result, that we also establish, which states
that no algorithmic solution for linear programming is input-to-state stable
when uncertainty in the problem data affects the dynamics as a disturbance. Our
results allow us to establish the resilience of the proposed distributed
dynamics to disturbances of finite variation and recurrently disconnected
communication among the agents. Simulations in an optimal control application
illustrate the results
Singularly perturbed forward-backward stochastic differential equations: application to the optimal control of bilinear systems
We study linear-quadratic stochastic optimal control problems with bilinear
state dependence for which the underlying stochastic differential equation
(SDE) consists of slow and fast degrees of freedom. We show that, in the same
way in which the underlying dynamics can be well approximated by a reduced
order effective dynamics in the time scale limit (using classical
homogenziation results), the associated optimal expected cost converges in the
time scale limit to an effective optimal cost. This entails that we can well
approximate the stochastic optimal control for the whole system by the reduced
order stochastic optimal control, which is clearly easier to solve because of
lower dimensionality. The approach uses an equivalent formulation of the
Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation, in terms of forward-backward SDEs
(FBSDEs). We exploit the efficient solvability of FBSDEs via a least squares
Monte Carlo algorithm and show its applicability by a suitable numerical
example
Design optimization applied in structural dynamics
This paper introduces the design optimization strategies, especially for structures which have dynamic constraints. Design optimization involves first the modeling and then the optimization of the problem. Utilizing the Finite Element (FE) model of a structure directly in an optimization process requires a long computation time. Therefore the Backpropagation Neural Networks (NNs) are introduced as a so called surrogate model for the FE model. Optimization techniques mentioned in this study cover the Genetic Algorithm (GA) and the Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) methods. For the applications of the introduced techniques, a multisegment cantilever beam problem under the constraints of its first and second natural frequency has been selected and solved using four different approaches
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