Mihai Anitescu The interior-point method (IPM) has become the workhorse method for nonlinear programming. The performance of IPM is directly related to the linear solver employed to factorize the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) system at each iteration of the algorithm. When solving large-scale nonlinear problems, state-of-the art IPM solvers rely on efficient sparse linear solvers to solve the KKT … Read more
Motivated by the increasing availability of high-performance parallel computing, we design a distributed parallel algorithm for linearly-coupled block-structured nonconvex constrained optimization problems. Our algorithm performs Jacobi-type proximal updates of the augmented Lagrangian function, requiring only local solutions of separable block nonlinear programming (NLP) problems. We provide a cheap and explicitly computable Lyapunov function that allows … Read more
We study solution sensitivity for nonlinear programs (NLPs) whose structure is induced by a graph $\mathcal{G}=(\mathcal{V},\mathcal{E})$. These graph-structured NLPs arise in many applications such as dynamic optimization, stochastic optimization, optimization with partial differential equations, and network optimization. We show that the sensitivity of the primal-dual solution at node $i\in \mathcal{V}$ against a data perturbation at … Read more
Despite cascading failures being the central cause of blackouts in power transmission systems, existing operational and planning decisions are made largely by ignoring their underlying cascade potential. This paper posits a reliability-aware AC Optimal Power Flow formulation that seeks to design a dispatch point which has a low operator-specified likelihood of triggering a cascade starting … Read more
We present a structured quasi-Newton algorithm for unconstrained optimization problems that have unavailable second-order derivatives or Hessian terms. We provide a formal derivation of the well-known BFGS secant update formula that approximates only the missing Hessian terms, and we propose a line-search quasi-Newton algorithm based on a modification of Wolfe conditions that converges to first-order … Read more
We show that the evolution of a dynamical system driven by controls obtained by the solution of an embedded optimization problem (as done in MPC) can be cast as a differential variational inequality (DVI). The DVI abstraction reveals that standard sampled-data MPC implementations (in which the control law is computed using states that are sampled … Read more
We argue that deterministic market clearing formulations introduce arbitrary distortions between day-ahead and expected real-time prices that bias economic incentives and block diversi cation. We extend and analyze the stochastic clearing formulation proposed by Pritchard et al. (2010) in which the social surplus function induces penalties between day-ahead and real-time quantities. We prove that the formulation … Read more
We present an approach for nonlinear programming (NLP) based on the direct minimization of an exact di erentiable penalty function using trust-region Newton techniques. As opposed to existing algorithmic approaches to NLP, the approach provides all the features required for scalability: it can eciently detect and exploit directions of negative curvature, it is superlinearly convergent, and … Read more
We present a parallelization of the revised simplex method for large extensive forms of two-stage stochastic linear programming (LP) problems. These problems have been considered too large to solve with the simplex method; instead, decomposition approaches based on Benders decomposition or, more recently, interior-point methods are generally used. However, these approaches do not provide optimal … Read more
We present a low-memory approach for the best-state estimate (data assimilation) of hidden Markov models where model error is considered. In particular, our findings apply for the 4D- Var framework. The novelty of our approach resides in the fact that the storage needed by our estimation framework, while including model error, is dramatically reduced from … Read more