Primal-dual interior-point methods with asymmetric barrier

In this paper we develop several polynomial-time interior-point methods (IPM) for solving nonlinear primal-dual conic optimization problem. We assume that the barriers for the primal and the dual cone are not conjugate. This broken symmetry does not allow to apply the standard primal-dual IPM. However, we show that in this situation it is also possible … Read more

On Verifiable Sufficient Conditions for Sparse Signal Recovery via L1 Minimization

We propose novel necessary and sufficient conditions for a sensing matrix to be “s-good” — to allow for exact L1-recovery of sparse signals with s nonzero entries when no measurement noise is present. Then we express the error bounds for imperfect L1-recovery (nonzero measurement noise, nearly s-sparse signal, near-optimal solution of the optimization problem yielding … Read more

Impulsive Optimal Control of Hybrid Finite-Dimensional Lagrangian Systems

The scope of this dissertation addresses numerical and theoretical issues in the impulsive control of hybrid finite-dimensional Lagrangian systems. In order to treat these aspects, a modeling framework is presented based on the measure-differential inclusion representation of the Lagrangian dynamics. The main advantage of this representation is that it enables the incorporation of set-valued force … Read more

Gradient based method for cone programming with application to large-scale compressed sensing

In this paper, we study a gradient based method for general cone programming (CP) problems. In particular, we first consider four natural primal-dual convex smooth minimization reformulations for them, and then discuss a variant of Nesterov’s smooth (VNS) method recently proposed by Tseng [30] for solving these reformulations. The associated worst-case major arithmetic operations costs … Read more

Dantzig-Wolfe and block coordinate-descent decomposition in large-scale integrated refinery-planning

The integrated refinery-planning (IRP), an instrumental problem in the petroleum industry, is made of several subsystems, each of them involving a large number of decisions. Despite the complexity of the overall planning problem, this work presents a mathematical model of the refinery operations char acterized by complete horizontal integration of subsystems from crude oil purchase … Read more

An SDP-based divide-and-conquer algorithm for large scale noisy anchor-free graph realization

We propose the DISCO algorithm for graph realization in $\real^d$, given sparse and noisy short-range inter-vertex distances as inputs. Our divide-and-conquer algorithm works as follows. When a group has a sufficiently small number of vertices, the basis step is to form a graph realization by solving a semidefinite program. The recursive step is to break … Read more

The N – k Problem in Power Grids: New Models, Formulations and Computation

Given a power grid modeled by a network together with equations describing the power flows, power generation and consumption, and the laws of physics, the so-called N – k problem asks whether there exists a set of k or fewer arcs whose removal will cause the system to fail. We present theoretical results and computation … Read more

On Theory of Compressive Sensing via L1-Minimization:

Compressive (or compressed) sensing (CS) is an emerging methodology in computational signal processing that has recently attracted intensive research activities. At present, the basic CS theory includes recoverability and stability: the former quantifies the central fact that a sparse signal of length n can be exactly recovered from much less than n measurements via L1-minimization … Read more

On fast integration to steady state and earlier times

The integration to steady state of many initial value ODEs and PDEs using the forward Euler method can alternatively be considered as gradient descent for an associated minimization problem. Greedy algorithms such as steepest descent for determining the step size are as slow to reach steady state as is forward Euler integration with the best … Read more

Numerical Experience with a Recursive Trust-Region Method for Multilevel Nonlinear Optimization

We consider an implementation of the recursive multilevel trust-region algorithm proposed by Gratton, Mouffe, Toint, Weber (2008) for bound-constrained nonlinear problems, and provide numerical experience on multilevel test problems. A suitable choice of the algorithm’s parameters is identified on these problems, yielding a satisfactory compromise between reliability and efficiency. The resulting default algorithm is then … Read more