This paper considers strategies for selecting the barrier parameter at every iteration of an interior-point method for nonlinear programming. Numerical experiments suggest that adaptive choices, such as Mehrotra’s probing procedure, outperform static strategies that hold the barrier parameter fixed until a barrier optimality test is satisfied. A new adaptive strategy is proposed based on the minimization of a quality function. The paper also proposes a globalization framework that ensures the convergence of adaptive interior methods. The barrier update strategies proposed in this paper are applicable to a wide class of interior methods and are tested in the two distinct algorithmic frameworks provided by the Ipopt and Knitro software packages.
Citation
Research Report RC23563, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown, USA