The modern era of interior-point methods dates to 1984, when Karmarkar proposed his algorithm for linear programming. In the years since then, algorithms and software for linear programming have become quite sophisticated, while extensions to more general classes of problems, such as convex quadratic programming, semidefinite programming, and nonconvex and nonlinear problems, have reached varying levels of maturity. We review some of the key developments in the area, including comments on both the complexity theory and practical algorithms for linear programming, semidefinite programming, monotone linear complementarity, and convex programming over sets that can be characterized by self-concordant barrier functions.

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...

In this paper, we describe our implementation of a primal-dual infeasible-interior-point algorithm for large-scale linear programming under the MATLAB 1 environment. The resulting software is called LIPSOL -- Linear-programming Interior-Point SOLvers. LIPSOL is designed to take the advantages of MATLAB's sparse-matrix functions and external interface facilities, and of existing Fortran sparse Cholesky codes. Under the MATLAB environment, LIPSOL inherits a high degree of simplicity and versatility in comparison to its counterparts in Fortran or C language. More importantly, our extensive computational results demonstrate that LIPSOL also attains an impressive performance comparable with that of efficient Fortran or C codes in solving large-scale problems. In addition, we discuss in detail a technique for overcoming numerical instability in Cholesky factorization at the end-stage of iterations in interior-point algorithms. Keywords: Linear programming, Primal-Dual infeasible-interior-p...

The object-oriented software package OOQP for solving convex quadratic programming problems (QP) is described. The primal-dual interior point algorithms supplied by OOQP are implemented in a way that is largely independent of the problem structure. Users may exploit problem structure by supplying linear algebra, problem data, and variable classes that are customized to their particular applications. The OOQP distribution contains default implementations that solve several important QP problem types, including general sparse and dense QPs, bound-constrained QPs, and QPs arising from support vector machines and Huber regression. The implementations supplied with the OOQP distribution are based on such well known linear algebra packages as MA27/57, LAPACK, and PETSc. OOQP demonstrates the usefulness of object-oriented design in optimization software development, and establishes standards that can be followed in the design of software packages for other classes of optimization problems. A number of the classes in OOQP may also be reusable directly in other codes.

Abstract. We investigate the use of interior-point methods for solving quadratic programming problems with a small number of linear constraints, where the quadratic term consists of a low-rank update to a positive semidefinite matrix. Several formulations of the support vector machine fit into this category. An interesting feature of these particular problems is the volume of data, which can lead to quadratic programs with between 10 and 100 million variables and, if written explicitly, a dense Q matrix. Our code is based on OOQP, an object-oriented interior-point code, with the linear algebra specialized for the support vector machine application. For the targeted massive problems, all of the data is stored out of core and we overlap computation and input/output to reduce overhead. Results are reported for several linear support vector machine formulations demonstrating that the method is reliable and scalable. Key words. support vector machine, interior-point method, linear algebra AMS subject classifications. 90C51, 90C20, 62H30 PII. S1052623400374379 1. Introduction. Interior-point methods [30] are frequently used to solve large convex quadratic and linear programs for two reasons. First, the number of iterations

Many practical large-scale optimization problems are not only sparse, but also display some form of block-structure such as primal or dual block angular structure. Often these structures are nested: each block of the coarse top level structure is block-structured itself. Problems with these characteristics appear frequently in stochastic programming but also in other areas such as telecommunication network modelling. We present a linear algebra library tailored for problems with such structure that is used inside an interior point solver for convex quadratic programming problems. Due to its object-oriented design it can be used to exploit virtually any nested block structure arising in practical problems, eliminating the need for highly specialised linear algebra modules needing to be written for every type of problem separately. Through a careful implementation we achieve almost automatic parallelisation of the linear algebra. The efficiency of the approach is illustrated on several problems arising in the financial planning, namely in the asset and liability management. The problems are modelled as

We describe the code PCx, a primal-dual interior-point code for linear programming. Information is given about problem formulation and the underlying algorithm, along with instructions for installing, invoking, and using the code. Computational results on standard test problems are tabulated. The current version number is 1.0. Key words: linear programming, interior-point methods, software. 1 This work was supported by the Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Division subprogram of the Office of Computational and Technology Research, U.S. Department of Energy, under Contract W-31-109Eng -38. 1 Introduction PCx is a linear programming solver developed at the Optimization Technology Center at Argonne National Laboratory and Northwestern University. It implements a variant of Mehrotra's predictor-corrector algorithm [6] with the higher-order correction strategy of Gondzio [3]. This primal-dual approach has proved to be the most efficient interior-point method for gene...

A practical warm-start procedure is described for the infeasible primal-dual interior-point method employed to solve the restricted master problem within the cutting-plane method. In contrast to the theoretical developments in this field, the approach presented in this paper does not make the unrealistic assumption that the new cuts are shallow. Moreover, it treats systematically the case when a large number of cuts are added at one time. The technique proposed in this paper has been implemented in the context of HOPDM, the state of the art, yet public domain, interior-point code. Numerical results confirm a high degree of efficiency of this approach: regardless of the number of cuts added at one time (can be thousands in the largest examples) and regardless of the depth of the new cuts, reoptimizations are usually done with a few additional iterations. Key words. Warm start, primal-dual algorithm, cutting-plane methods. Supported by the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique Su...

Re-optimization techniques for an interior point method applied to solve a sequence of linear programming problems are discussed. Conditions are given for problem perturbations that can be absorbed in merely one Newton step. The analysis is performed for both short-step and long-step feasible path-following method. A practical procedure is then derived for an infeasible path-following method. It is applied in the context of crash start for several large-scale structured linear programs. Numerical results with OOPS, the new object-oriented parallel solver demonstrate the efficiency of the approach. For large structured linear programs crash start leads to about 40% reduction of the iterations number and translates into 25% reduction of the solution time. The crash procedure parallelizes well and speed-ups between 3.1-3.8 on 4 processors are achieved.

We consider solving a sequence of weighted linear least squares problems where the changes from one problem to the next are the weights and the right hand side (or data). This is the case for primaldual interior-point methods. We derive a class of preconditioners based on a low rank correction to a Cholesky factorization of a weighted normal equation coefficient matrix with the previous weight. Key Words. Weighted linear least squares, Preconditioners, Preconditioned conjugate gradient for least squares, Linear programming, Primaldual infeasible-interior-point algorithms. 1 Introduction In this paper, we present a class of preconditioners based on low rank corrections to the Cholesky factorization of a weighted normal equation coefficient matrix. This class of preconditioners leads to good performance for interiorpoint methods for linear programming. Particularly, we have implemented primal-dual Newton method to test this class of preconditioners. The numerical results on large scale...