Application of general semi-infinite Programming to Lapidary Cutting Problems

We consider a volume maximization problem arising in gemstone cutting industry. The problem is formulated as a general semi-infinite program (GSIP) and solved using an interiorpoint method developed by Stein. It is shown, that the convexity assumption needed for the convergence of the algorithm can be satisfied by appropriate modelling. Clustering techniques are used to reduce the number of container constraints, which is necessary to make the subproblems practically tractable. An iterative process consisting of GSIP optimization and adaptive refinement steps is then employed to obtain an optimal solution which is also feasible for the original problem. Some numerical results based on realworld data are also presented

Monte Carlo Set-Membership Filtering for Nonlinear Dynamic Systems

This chapter considers the nonlinear filtering problem involving noises that are unknown and bounded. We propose a new filtering method via set-membership theory and boundary sampling technique to determine a state estimation ellipsoid. In order to guarantee the online usage, the nonlinear dynamics are linearized about the current estimate, and the remainder term is then bounded by an optimization ellipsoid, which can be described as the solution of a semi-infinite optimization problem. It is an analytically intractable problem for general nonlinear dynamic systems. Nevertheless, for a typical nonlinear dynamic system in target tracking, some certain regular properties for the remainder are analytically derived; then, we use a randomized method to approximate the semi-infinite optimization problem efficiently. Moreover, for some quadratic nonlinear dynamic systems, the semi-infinite optimization problem is equivalent to solving a semi-definite program problem. Finally, the set-membership prediction and measurement update are derived based on the recent optimization method and the online bounding ellipsoid of the remainder other than a priori bound. Numerical example shows that the proposed method performs better than the extended set-membership filter, especially in the situation of the larger noise