62 research outputs found
An Inequality Constrained SL/QP Method for Minimizing the Spectral Abscissa
We consider a problem in eigenvalue optimization, in particular finding a
local minimizer of the spectral abscissa - the value of a parameter that
results in the smallest value of the largest real part of the spectrum of a
matrix system. This is an important problem for the stabilization of control
systems. Many systems require the spectra to lie in the left half plane in
order for them to be stable. The optimization problem, however, is difficult to
solve because the underlying objective function is nonconvex, nonsmooth, and
non-Lipschitz. In addition, local minima tend to correspond to points of
non-differentiability and locally non-Lipschitz behavior. We present a
sequential linear and quadratic programming algorithm that solves a series of
linear or quadratic subproblems formed by linearizing the surfaces
corresponding to the largest eigenvalues. We present numerical results
comparing the algorithms to the state of the art
Reinforcement Learning Based on Real-Time Iteration NMPC
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven a stunning ability to learn optimal
policies from data without any prior knowledge on the process. The main
drawback of RL is that it is typically very difficult to guarantee stability
and safety. On the other hand, Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) is an
advanced model-based control technique which does guarantee safety and
stability, but only yields optimality for the nominal model. Therefore, it has
been recently proposed to use NMPC as a function approximator within RL. While
the ability of this approach to yield good performance has been demonstrated,
the main drawback hindering its applicability is related to the computational
burden of NMPC, which has to be solved to full convergence. In practice,
however, computationally efficient algorithms such as the Real-Time Iteration
(RTI) scheme are deployed in order to return an approximate NMPC solution in
very short time. In this paper we bridge this gap by extending the existing
theoretical framework to also cover RL based on RTI NMPC. We demonstrate the
effectiveness of this new RL approach with a nontrivial example modeling a
challenging nonlinear system subject to stochastic perturbations with the
objective of optimizing an economic cost.Comment: accepted for the IFAC World Congress 202
A Sequential Quadratic Programming Method for Optimization with Stochastic Objective Functions, Deterministic Inequality Constraints and Robust Subproblems
In this paper, a robust sequential quadratic programming method of [1] for
constrained optimization is generalized to problem with stochastic objective
function, deterministic equality and inequality constraints. A stochastic line
search scheme in [2] is employed to globalize the steps. We show that in the
case where the algorithm fails to terminate in finite number of iterations, the
sequence of iterates will converge almost surely to a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker point
under the assumption of extended Mangasarian-Fromowitz constraint
qualification. We also show that, with a specific sampling method, the
probability of the penalty parameter approaching infinity is 0. Encouraging
numerical results are reported
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