Interior-point algorithms for semidefinite programming problems derived from the Kalman-Yakubovich-Popov Lemma

Interior-point algorithms for semidefinite programming problems derived from the Kalman-Yakubovich-Popov Lemma

V. Balakrishnan

Presented at the European Union RTN Summer School on Multi-Agent Control, Hamilton Institute, 8 September 2003


Abstract Over the past decade, semidefinite programming (SDP), i.e., convex optimization with linear matrix inequality (LMI) constraints, has been established as a powerful numerical tool in systems and control. While new applications are still being discovered, research into the reformulation of systems and control problems as SDP problems has reached a level of considerable maturity. However, some limitations of SDP have also become apparent. Most important, the reduction of a control problem to an SDP problem often requires a large number of auxiliary variables, so that the resulting SDP problem can be very large, even though the underlying control problem is not particularly large-scale. This limits the problem sizes that can be handled by general-purpose SDP solvers, and hence the applicability of SDP in practical engineering problems. In order to have an impact on systems and control practice, future SDP solvers will have to be able to take advantage of problem structure, without overly restricting their scope of applicability or sacrificing reliability. With these observations serving as the backdrop, we discuss efficient implementations of primal-dual interior-point methods for SDP problems where the underlying LMIs have a special form that is typically encountered with the application of the Kalman-Yakubovich-Popov Lemma. Such LMIs are widely encountered in several systems engineering applications such as control and signal processing. We show how orders-of-magnitude savings in computation can be realized with primal-dual interior-point methods when problem structure is exploited using straightforward linear algebra techniques. (This work was performed jointly with L. Vandenberghe of UCLA, and A. Hansson and R. Wallin of Linkoping University.)
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