Semidefinite relaxation of a class of quadratic integral inequalities

Abstract

We propose a novel technique to solve optimization problems subject to a class of integral inequalities whose integrand is quadratic and homogeneous with respect to the dependent variables, and affine in the parameters. We assume that the dependent variables are subject to homogeneous boundary conditions. Specifically, we derive rigorous relaxations of such integral inequalities in terms of semidefinite constraints, so a strictly feasible and near-optimal point for the original problem can be computed using semidefinite programming. Simple examples arising from the stability analysis of partial differential equations illustrate the potential of our method compared to existing techniques.