A quasi-Newton interior-point method for optimization in Hilbert spaces
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
SEARCH · Search NASA
Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Modelling and solution library for security-constrained AC optimal power flow problems that uses nonlinear programming methods (interior-point methods) and solvers (Ipopt, HiOp). The code is written in C++ and provides parallel computing capabilities in the form of task parallelism (solving contingency problems in parallel). Code can run on a variety of commodity high-performance computing.
We approach the problem of parallelizing state-of-the-art nonlinear programming optimization algorithms.Specifically, we focus on parallelizing quasi-Newton interior-point methods that use limited-memory secant Hessian approximations. Such interior-point methods are known to have better convergence properties and to be more effective on large-scale problems than gradient-based and derivative-free optimization algorithms. We target nonlinear and potentially nonconvex optimization problems with an arbitrary number of bound constraints and a small number of general equality and inequality constraints on the optimization variables. These problems occur for example in the form of optimal control, optimal design, and inverse problems governed by ordinary or partial differential equations, whenever they are expressed in a “reduced-space” optimization approach. We introduce and analyze the time and space complexity of a decomposition method for solving the quasi-Newton linear systems that leverages the fact that the quasi-Newton Hessian matrix has a small number of dense blocks that border a low-rank update of a diagonal matrix. This enables an efficient parallelization on memory-distributed computers of the iterations of the optimization algorithm, a state-of-the-art filter line-search interior-point algorithm by Wächter et. al. We illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method by solving structural topology optimization problems on up to 4608 cores on a parallel machine.
Here, we present an efficient strongly polynomial algorithm for the projection of a point on the intersection of two hyperplanes and a box in \(\mathbb {R}^n\) . Interior point methods are the most efficient algorithm in the literature to solve this problem. While efficient in practice, the complexity of interior-point methods is bounded by a polynomial in the dimension of the problem and in the accuracy of the solution. Moreover, their efficiency is highly dependent on a series of parameters depending on the specific method chosen (especially for nonlinear problems), such as step size, barrier parameter, accuracy, among others. We propose a new method based on the KKT optimality conditions. In this method, we write the problem as a function of the Lagrangian multipliers of the hyperplanes and seek to find the pair of multipliers that corresponds to the optimal solution. We prove that the algorithm has complexity \(O(n^2 \log n)\) .
In this paper, we propose a homogeneous model for the class of mixed horizontal linear complementarity problems. The proposed homogeneous model is always solvable and provides the solution of the original problem if it exists, or a certificate of infeasibility otherwise. Our formulation preserves the sparsity of the original formulation and does not reduce to the homogeneous model of the equivalent standard linear complementarity problem. We study the properties of the model and show that interior-point methods can be used efficiently for the numerical solutions of the homogeneous problem. Finally, numerical experiments show convincingly that it is more efficient to use the proposed homogeneous model for the mixed horizontal linear complementarity problem than to use known homogeneous models for the equivalent standard linear complementarity problem.
SQP and interior-point methods (also referred to as Lagrange-Newton methods) typically share key algorithmic components, such as strategies for computing descent directions and mechanisms that promote global convergence. Building on this insight, we introduce a unifying framework with eight building blocks that abstracts the workflows of Lagrange-Newton methods. We then present Uno, a modular C++ solver that implements our unifying framework and allows the automatic combination of a wide range of strategies with no programming effort from the user. Uno is meant to (1) organize mathematical optimization strategies into a coherent hierarchy; (2) offer a wide range of efficient and robust methods that can be compared for a given instance; (3) enable researchers to experiment with novel optimization strategies; and (4) reduce the cost of development and maintenance of multiple optimization solvers. Uno’s software design allows user to compose new customized solvers for emerging optimization areas such as robust optimization or optimization problems with complementarity constraints, while building on reliable nonlinear optimization techniques. We demonstrate that Uno is highly competitive against state-of-the-art solvers filterSQP, IPOPT, SNOPT, MINOS, LANCELOT, LOQO, and CONOPT on a subset of 429 small problems from the CUTE collection. Uno is available as open-source software under the MIT license at https://github.com/cvanaret/Uno and via its C, Julia, Python, Fortran, and AMPL interfaces.
Here, we investigate how to port the standard interior-point method to new exascale architectures for block-structured nonlinear programs with state equations. Computationally, we decompose the interior-point algorithm into two successive operations: the evaluation of the derivatives and the solution of the associated Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) linear system. Our method accelerates both operations using two levels of parallelism. First, we distribute the computations on multiple processes using coarse parallelism. Second, each process uses SIMD/GPU accelerators locally to accelerate the operations using fine-grained parallelism. The KKT system is reduced by eliminating the inequalities and the state variables from the corresponding equations. We demonstrate our method's capability on the supercomputer Polaris, a testbed for the future exascale Aurora system. Each node is equipped with four GPUs, a setup amenable to our two-level approach. Our experiments on the stochastic optimal power flow problem show that the reduction method is 50x faster than the sparse linear solver HSL MA57 running in serial on the CPU, and 6x faster than Pardiso running in parallel on CPU on the same number of processes.
Robust security-constrained optimal power flow (rSCOPF) aims to find the worst-case contingencies of alternating current optimal power flow (ACOPF) in power systems. With the rise of GPU architectures on the upcoming supercomputer architectures, optimization algorithms that rely on sparse linear algebra and indefinite linear systems are becoming increasingly hard to solve efficiently (e.g. interior-point method). To address this we revisit a maximin optimization formulation of the rSCOPF and the single-level mixed-integer semidefinite programming (MISDP) reformulation, which is obtained by taking the Lagrangian relaxation of the inner minimization ACOPF problem. In this paper, we focus on the development of a proximal projection bundle method (PPBM) for solving continuous relaxation node subproblems of the MISDP problem, based primarily on the well-known alternating direction method of multipliers. Cutting planes reminiscent of bundle method ideas are also applied in coordination with updates of the proximal parameter. The cutting-plane method can generate a large number of linear inequalities, leading to a large scale but decomposable quadratic programming (QP) subproblem that is amenable to GPUs. We present the numerical results on the IEEE 30, 57, 118, and 300-bus systems by using our PBMM method. We discuss the main computational bottleneck of our method, which is the time taken to solve each iteration of a QP subproblem instance of the PPBM, and how GPU architectures can accelerate this solution process.
Low-frequency high-voltage ac transmission scheme has recently been proposed as an alternative approach for bulk power transmission. This paper proposes a multi-period optimal power flow (OPF) for a multi-frequency HVac transmission system that interconnects both conventional 50/60-Hz and low-frequency grids using back-to-back converters with a centralized control scheme. The OPF objective is to minimize system losses by determining the optimal dispatch for generators, shunt capacitors, and converters. The OPF constraints include the operational constraints of all HVac grid and converter stations. The resulting mixed-integer nonlinear programing problem is solved using a proposed framework based on the predictor-corrector primal-dual interior-point method. The proposed OPF formulation and solution approach are verified using a multi-frequency HVac transmission system that is modified from the IEEE 57-bus system. Here, the results with the optimal dispatch from the proposed method during a simulated day show a significant loss reduction and an improved voltage regulation compared to those when an arbitrary dispatch is chosen.
A framework is proposed for solving general convex quadratic programs (CQPs) from an infeasible starting point by invoking an existing feasible-start algorithm tailored for inequality-constrained CQPs. The central tool is an exact penalty function scheme equipped with a penalty-parameter updating rule. The feasible-start algorithm merely has to satisfy certain general requirements, and so is the updating rule. Under mild assumptions, the framework is proved to converge on CQPs with both inequality and equality constraints and, at a negligible additional cost per iteration, produces an infeasibility certificate, together with a feasible point for an (approximately) ℓ 1 -least relaxed feasible problem, when the given problem does not have a feasible solution. The framework is applied to a feasible-start constraint-reduced interior-point algorithm previously proved to be highly performant on problems with many more inequality constraints than variables (“imbalanced”). Numerical comparison with popular codes (OSQP, qpOASES, MOSEK) is reported on both randomly generated problems and support-vector machine classifier training problems. The results show that the former typically outperforms the latter on imbalanced problems. Finally, application of the proposed infeasible-start framework to other feasible-start algorithms is briefly considered, and is tested on a simplex iteration.
Here, we present a scalable approach to solve a class of partial differential equation (PDE)‐constrained optimization problems with bound constraints. This approach utilizes a robust full‐space interior‐point (IP)‐Gauss–Newton optimization method. To cope with the poorly‐conditioned IP‐Gauss–Newton saddle‐point linear systems that need to be solved approximately, once per optimization step, we propose two spectrally related preconditioners. These preconditioners leverage the limited informativeness of data in regularized PDE‐constrained optimization problems. A block Gauss–Seidel preconditioner is proposed for the GMRES‐based solution of the IP‐Gauss–Newton linear systems. It is shown, for a large‐class of PDE‐ and bound‐constrained optimization problems, that the spectrum of the block Gauss–Seidel preconditioned IP‐Gauss–Newton matrix is asymptotically independent of discretization and is not impacted by the ill‐conditioning that notoriously plagues interior‐point methods. We exploit symmetry of the IP‐Gauss–Newton linear systems and propose a regularization and log‐barrier Hessian preconditioner for the preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG)‐based solution of the equivalent IP‐Gauss–Newton–Schur complement linear systems. The eigenvalues of the block Gauss–Seidel preconditioned IP‐Gauss–Newton matrix, that are not equal to one, are identical to the eigenvalues of the regularization and log‐barrier Hessian preconditioned Schur complement matrix. The scalability of the approach is demonstrated on two example problems. The numerical solution of these optimization problems is shown to require a discretization independent number of IP‐Gauss–Newton linear solves. Furthermore, the linear systems are solved in a discretization and IP ill‐conditioning independent number of preconditioned Krylov subspace iterations. The parallel scalability of the preconditioner, achieved via algebraic multigrid component solvers when applicable, and the aforementioned algorithmic scalability permits a parallel scalable means to compute solutions of a large class of PDE‐ and bound‐constrained problems.
A constraint-reduced Mehrotra-predictor-corrector algorithm for convex quadratic programming is proposed. (At each iteration, such algorithms use only a subset of the inequality constraints in constructing the search direction, resulting in CPU savings.) The proposed algorithm makes use of a regularization scheme to cater to cases where the reduced constraint matrix is rank deficient. Global and local convergence properties are established under arbitrary working-set selection rules subject to satisfaction of a general condition. A modified active-set identification scheme that fulfills this condition is introduced. Numerical tests show great promise for the proposed algorithm, in particular for its active-set identification scheme. While the focus of the present paper is on dense systems, application of the main ideas to large sparse systems is briefly discussed.
Large-scale contact mechanics simulations are crucial in many engineering fields such as structural design and manufacturing. In the frictionless case, contact can be modeled by minimizing an energy functional; however, these problems are often nonlinear, nonconvex, and increasingly difficult to solve as mesh resolution increases. In this work, we employ a Newton-based interior-point (IP) filter line-search method, an effective approach for large-scale constrained optimization. While this method converges rapidly, each iteration requires solving a large saddle-point linear system that becomes ill-conditioned as the optimization process converges, largely due to IP treatment of the contact constraints. Such ill-conditioning can hinder solver scalability and increase iteration counts with mesh refinement. Here, to address this, we introduce a novel preconditioner, algebraic multigrid with filtering (AMGF), tailored to the Schur complement of the saddle-point system. Building on the classical AMG solver, commonly used for elasticity, we augment it with a specialized subspace correction that filters near null space components introduced by contact interface constraints. Through theoretical analysis and numerical experiments on a range of linear and nonlinear contact problems, we demonstrate that the proposed solver achieves mesh independent convergence and maintains robustness against the ill-conditioning that notoriously plagues IP methods. These results indicate that AMGF makes contact mechanics simulations more tractable and broadens the applicability of Newton-based IP methods in challenging engineering scenarios. More broadly, AMGF is well suited for problems, optimization or otherwise, where solver performance is limited by a low-dimensional subspace, such as those arising from localized constraints, interface conditions, or model heterogeneities. This makes the method widely applicable beyond contact mechanics and constrained optimization.
Here, we study the convergence properties of an overlapping Schwarz decomposition algorithm for solving nonlinear optimal control problems (OCPs). The algorithm decomposes the time domain into a set of overlapping subdomains, and solves all subproblems defined over subdomains in parallel. The convergence is attained by updating primal-dual information at the boundaries of overlapping subdomains. We show that the algorithm exhibits local linear convergence, and that the convergence rate improves exponentially with the overlap size. We also establish global convergence results for a general quadratic programming, which enables the application of the Schwarz scheme inside second-order optimization algorithms (e.g., sequential quadratic programming). The theoretical foundation of our convergence analysis is a sensitivity result of nonlinear OCPs, which we call "exponential decay of sensitivity" (EDS). Intuitively, EDS states that the impact of perturbations at domain boundaries (i.e., initial and terminal time) on the solution decays exponentially as one moves into the domain. Here, we expand a previous analysis available in the literature by showing that EDS holds for both primal and dual solutions of nonlinear OCPs, under uniform second-order sufficient condition, controllability condition, and boundedness condition. We conduct experiments with a quadrotor motion planning problem and a partial differential equations (PDE) control problem to validate our theory, and show that the approach is significantly more efficient than alternating direction method of multipliers and as efficient as the centralized interior-point solver.
Spacecraft attitude determination and control is an important part of a spacecraft to achieve its designed mission. As of today, many spacecrafts have been successfully launched, and most of them have performed well as they were designed. Many research papers have been published to address the attitude determination and control design problems. Several text books are available for students to learn the technology and for engineers to use as references. The most popular spacecraft models for attitude determination algorithms and control design methods are the Euler angle models and the quaternion models . The Euler angle models have been proved very efficient as the linearized models are controllable, and all standard linear control system design methods are directly applicable. The drawbacks related to the Euler angle methods are (a) the designs based on linearized models may not globally stabilize the original nonlinear spacecraft, i.e., the design may not work when the attitude of the spacecraft is far away from the point where the linearization is performed; (b) the models depend on the rotational sequences, this can be error prone if several teams work on the same project and they use different rotational sequences; (c) for any rotational sequence, there is a singular point where the model is not applicable; and (d) since most attitude determination methods use quaternion to represent the spacecraft attitude, there is a need to transform quaternion into Euler angles. On the other hand, for quaternion models, people have found controllers that can globally stabilize nonlinear spacecraft systems; the models do not depend on rotational sequences and they have no singular point; and the quaternion is provided by attitude determination system and ready to use. The main problem with the quaternion model based control system design is that the linearized quaternion model is not controllable. Therefore, most published design methods heavily rely on Lyapunov functions for the nonlinear spacecraft system. But there is no systematic way to obtain a desired Lyapunov functions. Moreover, the Lyapunov function based designs focus on the closed-loop system stability but pay little attention to the closed-loop system performance. In a series of papers, the author proposed some reduced quaternion models which lead to some controllable linearized spacecraft models. Therefore, all standard linear system theory can be directly applied to analyze and design the spacecraft control systems. We showed that, in some cases, the designed control system is not only optimal for the linearized system, but also globally stabilize the original nonlinear system . Clearly, the reduced quaternion models do not depend on rotational sequences. Due to the special structure of the linearized spacecraft model, some most important design methods, such as LQR design and robust pole assignment design are very simple, enjoy the analytical solutions for some problems, have direct connection to the performance measures, such as settling time, rising time , and percentage of overshoot . All these features are attractive for high quality control system designs. The idea mentioned above is then extended to more spacecraft control problems using specific actuators such as magnetic torque bars and control momentum gyroscopes. These types of actuators may not provide exactly desired torques. Most existing methods use different conversions to get approximate solutions, meaning that these actuators may generate a torque close to but not equal to the desired one. Using the reduced quaternion models that incorporate the actuators into the system model, the control inputs are not torques but the operational parameters. The main benefit of this idea is that the control actions are not approximate but accurate. As all actuators have their operational limit, design with input constraints are also considered in this book by using recently developed interior-point optimization techniques. This book grows up from my research on the spacecraft attitude determination and control design methods in more than a decade which is focused on using reduced quaternion models because of their merits stated above. The book provides all necessary background materials on orbital dynamics, rotations and quaternion, frequently used reference frames, transformations between reference frames, space environment and disturbance torques, ephemeris astronomical vector calculations and measurement instruments, spacecraft control actuators and their models, so that the readers will get a global picture and can apply all these information into the spacecraft system modeling, attitude determination, and spacecraft control system designs, which is the main purpose of this book. This book is different from existing books in that we focus on quaternion based spacecraft control system designs and we consider only attitude control system design related problems, from spacecraft modeling, to attitude determination and estimation, to control system design method selection, to control algorithm development, and to the simulation of the control system designs. Moreover, this book addresses different attitude control tasks in the spacecraft life cycle, including spacecraft maneuver, orbit raising, attitude control, and rendezvous. Finally, this book emphasizes the state space design methods rather than the classical frequency design methods.
The proposed research focuses on developing scalable algorithms for two-stage security-constrained OPF problems with AC power flow constraints, a class of problems complicated by (i) scale arising from a scenario representation; and (ii) the presence of nonlinearity, nonconvexity, and possibly second-stage discreteness or complementarity. Unfortunately, most existing solvers cannot contend with both challenges simultaneously; accordingly, the proposed research focuses on developing solution techniques that can both scale with the number of scenarios and contend with nonconvexity and second-stage complementarity. We consider three avenues for addressing such problems: (i) Variable sample-size SQP (VS-SQP) methods that combine sparse Quasi-Newton updates with a scalable variance-reduced stochastic gradient scheme for stochastic QP subproblems, allowing for contending with second-stage complementarity via regularization; (ii) Variable sample-size stochastic Interior-point (VS-sIP) schemes that propose a sampling-based regularized (to allow for contending with complementarity) interior-point schemes in which a Schur-complement technique is employed for decomposing the Newton direction computation step; (iii) Variable sample-size tractable ADMM (VS-tADMM) schemes combine variable sample-sizes with carefully designed techniques for resolving each of the nonconvex updates (by leveraging the QCQP structures). We intend to compare the three schemes using performance profiles in terms of solution quality, scalability, etc. and then select one scheme which will then be developed and further refined in Python for purposes of the GO competition.
This software implements parallel versions of an interior-point solver, based on the publicly available ipopt solver. Here we have full control over the linear solver and our algorithm is fully parallel thus enabling scalability to large-scale optimization problems. This package also has a parallel implementation of a homotopy solver developed under the scalable methods for contact LDRD project 23-ERD-017. This solver is an mfem-based implementation of algorithm described in ``A filter trust-region Newton continuation method for nonlinear complementarity problems''. Cosmin G. Petra, Nai-Yuan Chiang, Jingyi Wang, Tucker Hartland, and Michael Puso (submitted), LLNL-JRNL-869761.
The alternating current optimal power flow (AC-OPF) problem is critical to power system operations and planning, but it is generally hard to solve due to its nonconvex and large-scale nature. Furthermore, this paper proposes a scalable decomposition approach in which the power network is decomposed into a master network and a number of subnetworks, where each network has its own AC-OPF subproblem. This formulates a two-stage optimization problem and requires only a small amount of communication between the master and subnetworks. The key contribution is a smoothing technique that renders the response of a subnetwork differentiable with respect to the input from the master problem, utilizing properties of the barrier problem formulation that naturally arises when subproblems are solved by a primal-dual interior-point algorithm. Consequently, existing efficient nonlinear programming solvers can be used for both the master problem and the subproblems. The advantage of this framework is that speedup can be obtained by processing the subnetworks in parallel, and it has convergence guarantees under reasonable assumptions. The formulation is readily extended to instances with stochastic subnetwork loads. Numerical results show favorable performance and illustrate the scalability of the algorithm which is able to solve instances with more than 11 million buses.