A Projected-Search Interior Method for Nonlinear Optimization
by Philip E. Gill, Minxin Zhang
Abstract:
This paper concerns the formulation and analysis of a new interior-point
method for constrained optimization that combines a shifted
primal-dual interior-point method with a projected-search method for
bound-constrained optimization. The method involves the computation of an
approximate Newton direction for a primal-dual penalty-barrier function
that incorporates shifts on both the primal and dual variables. Shifts
on the dual variables allow the method to be safely ``warm started'' from a
good approximate solution and avoids the possibility of very large
solutions of the associated path-following equations. The approximate
Newton direction is used in conjunction with a new projected-search
line-search algorithm that employs a flexible non-monotone quasi-Armijo
line search for the minimization of each penalty-barrier
function. Numerical results are presented for a large set of constrained
optimization problems. For comparison purposes, results are also given for
two primal-dual interior-point methods that do not use projection. The
first is a method that shifts both the primal and dual variables. The
second is a method that involves shifts on the primal variables only. The
results show that the use of both primal and dual shifts in conjunction
with projection gives a method that is more robust and requires
significantly fewer iterations. In particular, the number of times that the
search direction must be computed is substantially reduced. Results from a
set of quadratic programming test problems indicate that the method is
particularly well-suited to solving the quadratic programming subproblem in
a sequential quadratic programming method for nonlinear optimization.