Moritz Diehl This paper presents novel convergence results for the Augmented Lagrangian based Alternating Direction Inexact Newton method (ALADIN) in the context of distributed convex optimization. It is shown that ALADIN converges for a large class of convex optimization problems from any starting point to minimizers without needing line-search or other globalization routines. Under additional regularity assumptions, … Read more
Quadratic programs (QP) with an indefinite Hessian matrix arise naturally in some direct optimal control methods, e.g. as subproblems in a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) scheme. Typically, the Hessian is approximated with a positive definite matrix to ensure having a unique solution; such a procedure is called \emph{regularization}. We present a novel regularization method tailored … Read more
This paper presents and analyzes an Inexact Newton-type optimization method based on Iterated Sensitivities (INIS). A particular class of Nonlinear Programming (NLP) problems is considered, where a subset of the variables is defined by nonlinear equality constraints. The proposed algorithm considers an arbitrary approximation for the Jacobian of these constraints. Unlike other inexact Newton methods, … Read more
Direct optimal control algorithms first discretize the continuous-time optimal control problem and then solve the resulting finite dimensional optimization problem. If Newton type optimization algorithms are used for solving the discretized problem, accurate first as well as second order sensitivity information needs to be computed. This article develops a novel approach for computing Hessian matrices … Read more
This paper presents a class of efficient Newton-type algorithms for solving the nonlinear programs (NLPs) arising from applying a direct collocation approach to continuous time optimal control. The idea is based on an implicit lifting technique including a condensing and expansion step, such that the structure of each subproblem corresponds to that of the multiple … Read more
This paper is about distributed derivative-based algorithms for solving optimization problems with a separable (potentially nonconvex) objective function and coupled affine constraints. A parallelizable method is proposed that combines ideas from the fields of sequential quadratic programming and augmented Lagrangian algorithms. The method negotiates shared dual variables that may be interpreted as prices, a concept … Read more
We consider a problem in eigenvalue optimization, in particular find- ing a local minimizer of the spectral abscissa – the value of a parameter that results in the smallest magnitude of the largest real part of the spectrum of a matrix system. This is an important problem for the stabilization of control sys- tems. Many … Read more
Sequential quadratic programming (SQP) methods are known to be effi- cient for solving a series of related nonlinear optimization problems because of desirable hot and warm start properties–a solution for one problem is a good estimate of the solution of the next. However, standard SQP solvers contain elements to enforce global convergence that can interfere … Read more
Quadratic programming problems (QPs) that arise from dynamic optimization problems typically exhibit a very particular structure. We address the ubiquitous case where these QPs are strictly convex and propose a dual Newton strategy that exploits the block-bandedness similarly to an interior-point method. Still, the proposed method features warmstarting capabilities of active-set methods. We give details … Read more
This paper studies an inexact perturbed path-following algorithm in the framework of Lagrangian dual decomposition for solving large-scale separable convex programming problems. Unlike the exact versions considered in the literature, we propose to solve the primal subproblems inexactly up to a given accuracy. This leads to an inexactness of the gradient vector and the Hessian … Read more