Optimization and Control (math.OC)

Abstract: In this paper the authors propose a polynomial algorithm which allows the computation of the farthest in an intersection of balls to a given point under three additional hypothesis: the farthest is unique, the distance to it is known and its magnitude is known. As a use case the authors analyze the subset sum problem SSP(S,T) for a given $S\in \mathbb{R}^n$ and $T \in \mathbb{R}$. The proposed approach is to write the SSP as a distance maximization over an intersection of balls. It was shown that the SSP has a solution if and only if the maximum value of the distance has a predefined value. This together with the fact that a solution is a corner of the unit hypercube, allows the authors to apply the proposed geometry results to find a solution to the SSP under the hypothesis that is unique.

Abstract: A quantitative frequency-domain condition related to the exponential stabilizability for infinite-dimensional linear control systems is presented. It is proven that this condition is necessary and sufficient for the stabilizability of special systems, while it is a necessary condition for the stabilizability in general. Applications are provided.

Abstract: In horticulture, spraying applications occur multiple times throughout any crop year. This paper presents a splittable agricultural chemical sprayed vehicle routing problem and formulates it as a mixed integer linear program. The main difference from the classical capacitated arc routing problem (CARP) is that our problem allows us to split the demand on a single demand edge amongst robotics sprayers. We are using theoretical insights about the optimal solution structure to improve the formulation and provide two different formulations of the splittable capacitated arc routing problem (SCARP), a basic spray formulation and a large edge demands formulation for large edge demands problems. This study presents solution methods consisting of lazy constraints, symmetry elimination constraints, and a heuristic repair method. Computational experiments on a set of valuable data based on the properties of real-world agricultural orchard fields reveal that the proposed methods can solve the SCARP with different properties. We also report computational results on classical benchmark sets from previous CARP literature. The tested results indicated that the SCARP model can provide cheaper solutions in some instances when compared with the classical CARP literature. Besides, the heuristic repair method significantly improves the quality of the solution by decreasing the upper bound when solving large-scale problems.

Abstract: The limited memory steepest descent method (Fletcher, 2012) for unconstrained optimization problems stores a few past gradients to compute multiple stepsizes at once. We review this method and propose new variants. For strictly convex quadratic objective functions, we study the numerical behavior of different techniques to compute new stepsizes. In particular, we introduce a method to improve the use of harmonic Ritz values. We also show the existence of a secant condition associated with LMSD, where the approximating Hessian is projected onto a low-dimensional space. In the general nonlinear case, we propose two new alternatives to Fletcher's method: first, the addition of symmetry constraints to the secant condition valid for the quadratic case; second, a perturbation of the last differences between consecutive gradients, to satisfy multiple secant equations simultaneously. We show that Fletcher's method can also be interpreted from this viewpoint.

Abstract: Motivated by singular limits for long-time optimal control problems, we investigate a class of parameter-dependent parabolic equations. First, we prove a turnpike result, uniform with respect to the parameters within a suitable regularity class and under appropriate bounds. The main ingredient of our proof is the justification of the uniform exponential stabilization of the corresponding Riccati equations, which is derived from the uniform null control properties of the model. Then, we focus on a heat equation with rapidly oscillating coefficients. In the one-dimensional setting, we obtain a uniform turnpike property with respect to the highly oscillatory heterogeneous medium. Afterward, we establish the homogenization of the turnpike property. Finally, our results are validated by numerical experiments.

Abstract: We prove that the solution operator of the classical unilateral obstacle problem on a nonempty open bounded set $\Omega \subset \mathbb{R}^d$, $d \in \mathbb{N}$, is Newton differentiable as a function from $L^p(\Omega)$ to $H_0^1(\Omega)$ whenever $\max(1, 2d/(d+2)) < p \leq \infty$. By exploiting this Newton differentiability property, results on angled subspaces in $H^{-1}(\Omega)$, and a formula for orthogonal projections onto direct sums, we further show that the solution map of the classical bilateral obstacle problem is Newton differentiable as a function from $L^p(\Omega)$ to $H_0^1(\Omega)\cap L^q(\Omega)$ whenever $\max(1, d/2) < p \leq \infty$ and $1 \leq q <\infty$. For both the unilateral and the bilateral case, we provide explicit formulas for the Newton derivative. As a concrete application example for our results, we consider the numerical solution of an optimal control problem with $H_0^1(\Omega)$-controls and box-constraints by means of a semismooth Newton method.

Abstract: There has been growing interest in high-order tensor methods for nonconvex optimization, with adaptive regularization, as they possess better/optimal worst-case evaluation complexity globally and faster convergence asymptotically. These algorithms crucially rely on repeatedly minimizing nonconvex multivariate Taylor-based polynomial sub-problems, at least locally. Finding efficient techniques for the solution of these sub-problems, beyond the second-order case, has been an open question. This paper proposes a second-order method, Quadratic Quartic Regularisation (QQR), for efficiently minimizing nonconvex quartically-regularized cubic polynomials, such as the AR$p$ sub-problem [3] with $p=3$. Inspired by [35], QQR approximates the third-order tensor term by a linear combination of quadratic and quartic terms, yielding (possibly nonconvex) local models that are solvable to global optimality. In order to achieve accuracy $\epsilon$ in the first-order criticality of the sub-problem, we show that the error in the QQR method decreases either linearly or by at least $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{4/3})$ for locally convex iterations, while in the sufficiently nonconvex case, by at least $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon)$; thus improving, on these types of iterations, the general cubic-regularization bound. Preliminary numerical experiments indicate that two QQR variants perform competitively with state-of-the-art approaches such as ARC (also known as AR$p$ with $p=2$), achieving either a lower objective value or iteration counts.

Abstract: This paper is devoted to the development and convergence analysis of greedy reconstruction algorithms based on the strategy presented in [Y. Maday and J. Salomon, Joint Proceedings of the 48th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and the 28th Chinese Control Conference, 2009, pp. 375--379]. These procedures allow the design of a sequence of control functions that ease the identification of unknown operators in nonlinear dynamical systems. The original strategy of greedy reconstruction algorithms is based on an offline/online decomposition of the reconstruction process and an ansatz for the unknown operator obtained by an a priori chosen set of linearly independent matrices. In the previous work [S. Buchwald, G. Ciaramella and J. Salomon, SIAM J. Control Optim., 59(6), pp. 4511-4537], convergence results were obtained in the case of linear identification problems. We tackle here the more general case of nonlinear systems. More precisely, we introduce a new greedy algorithm based on the linearized system. Then, we show that the controls obtained with this new algorithm lead to the local convergence of the classical Gauss-Newton method applied to the online nonlinear identification problem. We then extend this result to the controls obtained on nonlinear systems where a local convergence result is also proved. The main convergence results are obtained for the reconstruction of drift operators in dynamical systems with linear and bilinear control structures.