In the past 10 years the interior point methods (IPM) for linear programming have gained extraordinary interest as an alternative to the sparse simplex based methods. This has initiated a fruitful competition between the two types of algorithms which has lead to very efficient implementations on both sides. The significant difference between interior point and simplex based methods is reflected not only in the theoretical background but also in the practical implementation. In this paper we give an overview of the most important characteristics of advanced implementations of interior point methods. First, we present the infeasible-primal-dual algorithm which is widely considered the most efficient general purpose IPM. Our discussion includes various algorithmic enhancements of the basic algorithm. The only shortcoming of the "traditional" infeasible-primal-dual algorithm is to detect a possible primal or dual infeasibility of the linear program. We discuss how this problem can be solve...

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Recently the authors have proposed a homogeneous and self-dual algorithm for solving the monotone complementarity problem (MCP) [5]. The algorithm is a single phase interior-point type method, nevertheless it yields either an approximate optimal solution or detects a possible infeasibility of the problem. In this paper we specialize the algorithm to the solution of general smooth convex optimization problems that also possess nonlinear inequality constraints and free variables. We discuss an implementation of the algorithm for large-scale sparse convex optimization. Moreover, we present computational results for solving quadratically constrained quadratic programming and geometric programming problems, where some of the problems contain more than 100,000 constraints and variables. The results indicate that the proposed algorithm is also practically efficient. Department of Management, Odense University, Campusvej 55, DK-5230 Odense M, Denmark. E-mail: eda@busieco.ou.dk y ...