On geometrical properties of preconditioners in IPMs for classes of block-angular problems

One of the most efficient interior-point methods for some classes of block-angular structured problems solves the normal equations by a combination of Cholesky factorizations and preconditioned conjugate gradient for, respectively, the block and linking constraints. In this work we show that the choice of a good preconditioner depends on geometrical properties of the constraints structure. … Read more

A Distributed Interior-Point KKT Solver for Multistage Stochastic Optimization

Multistage stochastic optimization leads to NLPs over scenario trees that become extremely large when many time stages or fine discretizations of the probability space are required. Interior-point methods are well suited for these problems if the arising huge, structured KKT systems can be solved efficiently, for instance, with a large scenario tree but a moderate … Read more

Constrained Optimization with Low-Rank Tensors and Applications to Parametric Problems with PDEs

Low-rank tensor methods provide efficient representations and computations for high-dimensional problems and are able to break the curse of dimensionality when dealing with systems involving multiple parameters. We present algorithms for constrained nonlinear optimization problems that use low-rank tensors and apply them to optimal control of PDEs with uncertain parameters and to parametrized variational inequalities. … Read more

A branch-price-and-cut algorithm for the vehicle routing problem with time windows and multiple deliverymen

We address a variant of the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) that includes the decision of how many deliverymen should be assigned to each vehicle. In this variant, the service time at each customer depends on the size of the respective demand and on the number of deliverymen assigned to visit this customer. … Read more

Regularized Interior Proximal Alternating Direction Method for Separable Convex Optimization Problems

In this article we present a version of the proximal alternating direction method for a convex problem with linear constraints and a separable objective function, in which the standard quadratic regularizing term is replaced with an interior proximal metric for those variables that are required to satisfy some additional convex constraints. Moreover, the proposed method … Read more

A polynomial primal-dual affine scaling algorithm for symmetric conic optimization

The primal-dual Dikin-type affine scaling method was originally proposed for linear optimization and then extended to semidefinite optimization. Here, the method is generalized to symmetric conic optimization using the notion of Euclidean Jordan algebras. The method starts with an interior feasible but not necessarily centered primal-dual solution, and it features both centering and reducing the … Read more

A priori bounds on the condition numbers in interior-point methods

Interior-point methods are known to be sensitive to ill-conditioning and to scaling of the data. This paper presents new asymptotically sharp bounds on the condition numbers of the linear systems at each iteration of an interior-point method for solving linear or semidefinite programs and discusses a stopping test which leads to a problem-independent “a priori” … Read more

A Constraint-reduced Algorithm for Semidefinite Optimization Problems using HKM and AHO directions

We develop a new constraint-reduced infeasible predictor-corrector interior point method for semidefinite programming, and we prove that it has polynomial global convergence and superlinear local convergence. While the new algorithm uses HKM direction in predictor step, it adopts AHO direction in corrector step to obtain faster approach to the central path. In contrast to the … Read more

A Constraint-Reduced Algorithm for Semidefinite Optimization Problems with Superlinear Convergence

Constraint reduction is an essential method because the computational cost of the interior point methods can be effectively saved. Park and O’Leary proposed a constraint-reduced predictor-corrector algorithm for semidefinite programming with polynomial global convergence, but they did not show its superlinear convergence. We first develop a constraint-reduced algorithm for semidefinite programming having both polynomial global … Read more

HIPAD – A Hybrid Interior-Point Alternating Direction algorithm for knowledge-based SVM and feature selection

We consider classification tasks in the regime of scarce labeled training data in high dimensional feature space, where specific expert knowledge is also available. We propose a new hybrid optimization algorithm that solves the elastic-net support vector machine (SVM) through an alternating direction method of multipliers in the first phase, followed by an interior-point method … Read more