Primal–dual interior-point algorithm for symmetric model predictive control

Abstract

This paper presents a primal–dual interior-point (pdip) optimization algorithm for solving extreme-scale model predictive control (mpc) problems with linear dynamics, polytopic constraints, and quadratic/linear costs which are all invariant under the symmetric-group. We show that exploiting symmetry can reduce the computational and memory burden of extreme-scale or fast-paced applications of mpc. Our algorithm transforms the original inputs, states, and constraints of the mpc problem into a symmetric domain. The premise of our algorithm is that the numerical linear algebra used to solve the optimization problem has lower computational and memory complexity in the transformed domain. We demonstrate our algorithm for a heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (hvac) numerical example. We show that, for our largest hvac control problem, our symmetry exploiting the pdip algorithm reduces the computation-time from minutes to seconds in comparison with the baseline pdip algorithm. Furthermore, we show that the presented symmetry exploiting pdip algorithm outperforms a state-of-the-art symmetry exploiting optimization algorithm.