7,409 research outputs found
An Alternating Trust Region Algorithm for Distributed Linearly Constrained Nonlinear Programs, Application to the AC Optimal Power Flow
A novel trust region method for solving linearly constrained nonlinear
programs is presented. The proposed technique is amenable to a distributed
implementation, as its salient ingredient is an alternating projected gradient
sweep in place of the Cauchy point computation. It is proven that the algorithm
yields a sequence that globally converges to a critical point. As a result of
some changes to the standard trust region method, namely a proximal
regularisation of the trust region subproblem, it is shown that the local
convergence rate is linear with an arbitrarily small ratio. Thus, convergence
is locally almost superlinear, under standard regularity assumptions. The
proposed method is successfully applied to compute local solutions to
alternating current optimal power flow problems in transmission and
distribution networks. Moreover, the new mechanism for computing a Cauchy point
compares favourably against the standard projected search as for its activity
detection properties
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
Exploiting Chordality in Optimization Algorithms for Model Predictive Control
In this chapter we show that chordal structure can be used to devise
efficient optimization methods for many common model predictive control
problems. The chordal structure is used both for computing search directions
efficiently as well as for distributing all the other computations in an
interior-point method for solving the problem. The chordal structure can stem
both from the sequential nature of the problem as well as from distributed
formulations of the problem related to scenario trees or other formulations.
The framework enables efficient parallel computations.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1502.0638
Adapting the interior point method for the solution of LPs on serial, coarse grain parallel and massively parallel computers
In this paper we describe a unified scheme for implementing an interior point algorithm (IPM) over a range of computer architectures. In the inner iteration of the IPM a search direction is computed using Newton's method. Computationally this involves solving a sparse symmetric positive definite (SSPD) system of equations. The choice of direct and indirect methods for the solution of this system, and the design of data structures to take advantage of serial, coarse grain parallel and massively parallel computer architectures, are considered in detail. We put forward arguments as to why integration of the system within a sparse simplex solver is important and outline how the system is designed to achieve this integration
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