This paper presents a quadratic approximation for the optimal power flow in power distributions systems. The proposed approach is based on a linearized load flow which is valid for power distribution systems including three-phase unbalanced operation. The main feature of the methodology is its simplicity. The accuracy of the proposed approximation is compared to the non-linear/non-convex formulation of the optimal power flow using different optimization solvers. The studies indicate the proposed approximation provides a very accurate solution for systems with a good voltage profile. Results over a set of 1000 randomly generated test power distribution systems demonstrate this solution can be considered for practical purposes in most of the cases. An analytical solution for the unconstrained problem is also developed. This solution can be used as an initialization point for a more precise formulation of the problem.
The radius of the outer Dikin ellipsoid of the intersection of $m$ ellipsoids due to Fu et al. (J. Comb. Optim., 2, 29-50, 1998) is corrected from $m$ to $\sqrt{m^2+m}$. The approximation bound for the general convex quadratic constrained nonconvex quadratic program is correspondingly corrected.
This paper is concerned with a linear quadratic (LQ, for short) optimal control problem with fixed terminal states and integral quadratic constraints. A Riccati equation with infinite terminal value is introduced, which is uniquely solvable and whose solution can be approximated by the solution for a suitable unconstrained LQ problem with penalized terminal state. Using results from duality theory, the optimal control is explicitly derived by solving the Riccati equation together with an optimal parameter selection problem. It turns out that the optimal control is not only a feedback of the cu…
Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) is a powerful class of algorithms for solving nonlinear optimization problems. Local convergence of SQP algorithms is guaranteed when the Hessian approximation used in each Quadratic Programming subproblem is close to the true Hessian. However, a good Hessian approximation can be expensive to compute. Low cost Hessian approximations only guarantee local convergence under some assumptions, which are not always satisfied in practice. To address this problem, this paper proposes a simple method to guarantee local convergence for SQP with poor Hessian approxi…
We consider the problem of approximately solving a standard bi-quadratic programming (StBQP), which is NP-hard. After reformulating the original problem as an equivalent copositive tensor programming, we show how to approximate the optimal solution by approximating the cone of copositive tensors via a serial polyhedral cones. The established quality of approximation shows that, a polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS) for solving StBQP exists and can be extended to solving standard multi-quadratic programming. Some numerical examples are provided to illustrate our approach.
This paper develops new semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation techniques for two classes of mixed binary quadratically constrained quadratic programs (MBQCQP) and analyzes their approximation performance. The first class of problem finds two minimum norm vectors in $N$-dimensional real or complex Euclidean space, such that $M$ out of $2M$ concave quadratic functions are satisfied. By employing a special randomized rounding procedure, we show that the ratio between the norm of the optimal solution of this model and its SDP relaxation is upper bounded by $\frac{54M^2}π$ in the real case and …
We consider the problem of approximating nonconvex quadratic optimization with ellipsoid constraints (ECQP). We show some SDP-based approximation bounds for special cases of (ECQP) can be improved by trivially applying the extened Pataki's procedure. The main result of this paper is to give a new analysis on approximating (ECQP) by the SDP relaxation, which greatly improves Tseng's result [SIAM Journal Optimization, 14, 268-283, 2003]. As an application, we strictly improve the approximation ratio for the assignment-polytope constrained quadratic program.
In this paper, we consider linear quadratic optimal control with mean-field type for discrete-time stochastic systems with state and control dependent noise. An optimal control problem is studied for a linear mean-field stochastic differential equation with a quadratic cost functional. The coefficients and the weighting matrices in the cost functional are all assumed to be deterministic.
We study the equivalence of several well-known sufficient optimality conditions for a general quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP). The conditions are classified in two categories. The first one is for determining an optimal solution and the second one is for finding an optimal value. The first category of conditions includes the existence of a saddle point of the Lagrangian function and the existence of a rank-1 optimal solution of the primal SDP relaxation of QCQP. The second category includes $η_p = ζ$, $η_d = ζ$, and $φ= ζ$, where $ζ$, $η_p$, $η_d$, and $φ$ denote the optimal…
In a recent paper, Bubeck, Lee, and Singh introduced a new first order method for minimizing smooth strongly convex functions. Their geometric descent algorithm, largely inspired by the ellipsoid method, enjoys the optimal linear rate of convergence. We show that the same iterate sequence is generated by a scheme that in each iteration computes an optimal average of quadratic lower-models of the function. Indeed, the minimum of the averaged quadratic approaches the true minimum at an optimal rate. This intuitive viewpoint reveals clear connections to the original fast-gradient methods and cutt…
This paper considers the stochastic linear quadratic optimal control problem in which the control domain is nonconvex. By the functional analysis and convex perturbation methods, we establish a novel maximum principle. The application of the proposed maximum principle is illustrated through a work-out example.
Stochastic Optimal Linear Quadratic Regulation Control of Discrete-time Systems with Delay and Quadratic Constraints
School of Control Science and Engineering, Shandong University（山东大学控制科学与工程学院）；College of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Shandong University of Science and Technology（山东科技大学电气工程学院）
This paper is concerned with a linear quadratic optimal control problem of delayed backward stochastic differential equations. An explicit representation is derived for the optimal control, which is a linear feedback of the entire past history and the future state trajectory in a short period of time. This is one of the major distinctive features of the delayed backward stochastic linear quadratic optimal control problem. To obtain the optimal feedback, a new class of delayed Riccati equations is introduced and the unique solvability of their solutions are discussed in detail.
We study the closed-loop solvability of a stochastic linear quadratic optimal control problem for systems governed by stochastic evolution equations. This solvability is established by means of solvability of the corresponding Riccati equation, which is implied by the uniform convexity of the quadratic cost functional. At last, conditions ensuring the uniform convexity of the cost functional are discussed.
This paper is concerned with a linear quadratic optimal control for a class of singular Volterra integral equations. Under proper convexity conditions, optimal control uniquely exists, and it could be characterized via Frechet derivative of the quadratic functional in a Hilbert space or via maximum principle type necessary conditions. However, these (equivalent) characterizations have a shortcoming that the current value of the optimal control depends on the future values of the optimal state. Practically, this is not feasible. The main purpose of this paper is to obtain a causal state feedbac…
In this paper, we compare the strength of the optimal perspective reformulation and Shor's SDP relaxation. We prove these two formulations are equivalent for quadratic optimization problems with indicator variables.
A Deterministic affine quadratic optimal control problem is considered. Due to the nature of the problem, optimal controls exist under some very mild conditions. Further, it is shown that under some assumptions, the value function is differentiable and therefore satisfies the corresponding Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation in the classical sense. Moreover, the so-called quasi-Riccati equation is derived and any optimal control admits a state feedback representation.
This paper addresses an open problem in the area of linear quadratic optimal control. We consider the regular, infinite-horizon, stability-modulo-a-subspace, indefinite linear quadratic problem under the assumption that the dynamics are stabilizable. Our result generalizes previous works dealing with the same problem in the case of controllable dynamics. We explicitly characterize the unique solution of the algebraic Riccati equation that gives the optimal cost and optimal feedback control, as well as necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of optimal controls.
A new method for solving optimal tracking control of linear quadratic time-varying systems with multiple time delays in state and input variables and with combined constraints is presented in this paper. By using the relations of Chebyshev wavelets, we simulate the optimal tracking problem to a static optimization one. This alternative method is applied on different optimal tracking systems and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
This paper first presents necessary and sufficient conditions for the solvability of discrete time, mean-field, stochastic linear-quadratic optimal control problems. Then, by introducing several sequences of bounded linear operators, the problem becomes an operator stochastic LQ problem, in which the optimal control is a linear state feedback. Furthermore, from the form of the optimal control, the problem changes to a matrix dynamic optimization problem. Solving this optimization problem, we obtain the optimal feedback gain and thus the optimal control. Finally, by completing the square, the o…
In this paper, we define and solve the Inverse Stochastic Optimal Control (ISOC) problem of the linear-quadratic Gaussian (LQG) and the linear-quadratic sensorimotor (LQS) control model. These Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) models are state-of-the-art approaches describing human movements. The LQG ISOC problem consists of finding the unknown weighting matrices of the quadratic cost function and the covariance matrices of the additive Gaussian noise processes based on ground truth trajectories observed from the human in practice. The LQS ISOC problem aims at additionally finding the covarianc…
This paper is concerned with the stochastic linear-quadratic optimal control problem with Poisson jumps. The coefficients in the state equation and the weighting matrices in the cost functional are all deterministic but are allowed indefinite. The notion of closed-loop strategies is introduced, and the optimal closed-loop strategy is characterized by a Riccati integral-differential equation and a backward stochastic differential equation with Poisson jumps.
This paper is concerned with linear quadratic optimal control problems for mean-field backward stochastic differential equations (MF-BSDEs, for short) with deterministic coefficients. The optimality system, which is a linear mean-field forward-backward stochastic differential equation with constraint, is obtained by a variational method. By decoupling the optimality system, two coupled Riccati equations and an MF-BSDE are derived. It turns out that the coupled two Riccati equations are uniquely solvable. Then a complete and explicit representation is obtained for the optimal control.
We consider a general linear control system and a general quadratic cost, where the state evolves continuously in time and the control is sampled, i.e., is piecewise constant over a subdivision of the time interval. This is the framework of a linear-quadratic optimal sampled-data control problem. As a first result, we prove that, as the sampling periods tend to zero, the optimal sampled-data controls converge pointwise to the optimal permanent control. Then, we extend the classical Riccati theory to the sampled-data control framework, by developing two different approaches: the first one uses …
This paper is concerned with mean-field stochastic linear-quadratic (MF-SLQ, for short) optimal control problems with deterministic coefficients. The notion of weak closed-loop optimal strategy is introduced. It is shown that the open-loop solvability is equivalent to the existence of a weak closed-loop optimal strategy. Moreover, when open-loop optimal controls exist, there is at least one of them admitting a state feedback representation, which is the outcome of a weak closed-loop optimal strategy. Finally, an example is presented to illustrate the procedure for finding weak closed-loop opti…
This paper is concerned with a discrete-time mean-field stochastic linear-quadratic optimal control problem arose from financial application. Through matrix dynamical optimization method, a group of linear feedback controls is investigated. The problem is then reformulated as an operator stochastic linear-quadratic optimal control problem by a sequence of bounded linear operators over Hilbert space, the optimal control with six algebraic Riccati difference equations is obtained by backward induction. The two above approaches are proved to be coincided by the classical method of completing the …
This paper studies a continuous-time stochastic linear-quadratic (SLQ) optimal control problem on infinite-horizon. A data-driven policy iteration algorithm is proposed to solve the SLQ problem. Without knowing three system coefficient matrices, this algorithm uses the collected data to iteratively approximate a solution of the corresponding stochastic algebraic Riccati equation (SARE). A simulation example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness and applicability of the algorithm.
An alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) solver is described for optimal resource allocation problems with separable convex quadratic costs and constraints and linear coupling constraints. We describe a parallel implementation of the solver on a graphics processing unit (GPU) using a bespoke quartic function minimizer. An application to robust optimal energy management in hybrid electric vehicles is described, and the results of numerical simulations comparing the computation times of the parallel GPU implementation with those of an equivalent serial implementation are presented.
In this paper, we consider the inverse optimal control problem for the discrete-time linear quadratic regulator, over finite-time horizons. Given observations of the optimal trajectories, and optimal control inputs, to a linear time-invariant system, the goal is to infer the parameters that define the quadratic cost function. The well-posedness of the inverse optimal control problem is first justified. In the noiseless case, when these observations are exact, we analyze the identifiability of the problem and provide sufficient conditions for uniqueness of the solution. In the noisy case, when …
This paper is concerned with an optimal control problem for a mean-field linear stochastic differential equation with a quadratic functional in the infinite time horizon. Under suitable conditions, including the stabilizability, the (strong) exponential, integral, and mean-square turnpike properties for the optimal pair are established. The keys are to correctly formulate the corresponding static optimization problem and find the equations determining the correction processes. These have revealed the main feature of the stochastic problems which are significantly different from the determinist…
Successive quadratic approximations (SQA) are numerically efficient for minimizing the sum of a smooth function and a convex function. The iteration complexity of inexact SQA methods has been analyzed recently. In this paper, we present an algorithmic framework of inexact SQA methods with four types of line searches, and analyze its global complexity under milder assumptions. First, we show its well-definedness and some decreasing properties. Second, under the quadratic growth condition and a uniform positive lower bound condition on stepsizes, we show that the function value sequence and the …
In this paper, we study a linear-quadratic optimal control problem for mean-field stochastic differential equations driven by a Poisson random martingale measure and a multidimensional Brownian motion. Firstly, the existence and uniqueness of the optimal control is obtained by the classic convex variation principle. Secondly, by the duality method, the optimality system, also called the stochastic Hamilton system which turns out to be a linear fully coupled mean-field forward-backward stochastic differential equation with jumps, is derived to characterize the optimal control. Thirdly, applying…
A linear-quadratic (LQ, for short) optimal control problem is considered for mean-field stochastic differential equations with constant coefficients in an infinite horizon. The stabilizability of the control system is studied followed by the discussion of the well-posedness of the LQ problem. The optimal control can be expressed as a linear state feedback involving the state and its mean, through the solutions of two algebraic Riccati equations. The solvability of such kind of Riccati equations is investigated by means of semi-definite programming method.
This paper is concerned with a linear-quadratic (LQ, for short) optimal control problem for backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs, for short), where the coefficients of the backward control system and the weighting matrices in the cost functional are allowed to be random. By a variational method, the optimality system, which is a coupled linear forward-backward stochastic differential equation (FBSDE, for short), is derived, and by a Hilbert space method, the unique solvability of the optimality system is obtained. In order to construct the optimal control, a new stochastic Riccati…
This paper presents a novel value iteration (VI) algorithm for finding the optimal control for a kind of infinite-horizon stochastic linear quadratic (SLQ) problem with unknown systems. First, an off-line algorithm is estabilished to obtain the optimal feedback control of our problem. Then, based on the off-line algorithm, the VI-based model-free algorithm and its convergence proof is provided. The main feature of the model-free algorithm is that a stabilizing control is not needed to initiate the algorithm. Finally, we validate our results with a simulation example.
This paper is concerned with a backward stochastic linear-quadratic (LQ, for short) optimal control problem with deterministic coefficients. The weighting matrices are allowed to be indefinite, and cross-product terms in the control and state processes are present in the cost functional. Based on a Hilbert space method, necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for the solvability of the problem, and a general approach for constructing optimal controls is developed. The crucial step in this construction is to establish the solvability of a Riccati-type equation, which is accomplished und…
This paper investigates an infinite-horizon linear quadratic stochastic (LQS) optimal control problem for a class of continuous-time stochastic systems. By employing the technique of adaptive dynamic programming (ADP), we propose a novel model-free policy iteration (PI) algorithm. Without needing all information of the system coefficient matrices, the proposed PI algorithm iterates by using the data of the input and system state collected on a fixed time interval. Finally, a numerical example is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the obtained algorithm.
In this paper, the problem of finite horizon inverse optimal control (IOC) is investigated, where the quadratic cost function of a dynamic process is required to be recovered based on the observation of optimal control sequences. We propose the first complete result of the necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of corresponding LQ cost functions. Under feasible cases, the analytic expression of the whole solution space is derived and the equivalence of weighting matrices in LQ problems is discussed. For infeasible problems, an infinite dimensional convex problem is formulated to …
This paper focuses on indefinite stochastic mean-field linear-quadratic (MF-LQ, for short) optimal control problems, which allow the weighting matrices for state and control in the cost functional to be indefinite. The solvability of stochastic Hamiltonian system and Riccati equations is presented under both positive definite case and indefinite case. The optimal controls in open-loop form and closed-loop form are obtained, respectively. Moreover, the dynamic mean-variance problem can be solved within the framework of the indefinite MF-LQ problem. Other two examples shed light on the theoretic…
In this work, we propose a feedback control based temporal discretization for linear quadratic optimal control problems (LQ problems) governed by controlled mean-field stochastic differential equations. We firstly decompose the original problem into two problems: a stochastic LQ problem and a deterministic one. Secondly, we discretize both LQ problems one after another relying on Riccati equations and control's feedback representations. Then, we prove the convergence rates for the proposed discretization and present an effective algorithm. Finally, a numerical example is provided to support th…
One of the fundamental issues in Control Theory is to design feedback controls. It is well-known that, the purpose of introducing Riccati equations in the deterministic case is to provide the desired feedback controls for linear quadratic control problems. To date, the same problem in the stochastic setting is only partially well-understood. In this paper, we establish the equivalence between the existence of optimal feedback controls for the stochastic linear quadratic control problems with random coefficients and the solvability of the corresponding backward stochastic Riccati equations in a…
This paper studies symmetric constrained linear-quadratic optimal control problems and their parametric solutions. The parametric solution of such a problem is a piecewise-affine feedback law that can be equivalently expressed as a set of active sets. We show symmetries of the optimal control problem entail symmetries of the active sets, which can be used to simplify finding the set of active sets considerably. Specifically, we improve a recently proposed method for the dynamic-programming-based enumeration of all active sets. The achieved reduction of the computational effort is illustrated w…
An optimal control problem is considered for linear stochastic differential equations with quadratic cost functional. The coefficients of the state equation and the weights in the cost functional are bounded operators on the spaces of square integrable random variables. The main motivation of our study is linear quadratic optimal control problems for mean-field stochastic differential equations. Open-loop solvability of the problem is investigated, which is characterized as the solvability of a system of linear coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDE, for short) with …
A linear control system with quadratic cost functional over infinite time horizon is considered without assuming controllability/stabilizability condition and the global integrability condition for the nonhomogeneous term of the state equation and the weight functions in the linear terms in the running cost rate function. Classical approaches do not apply for such kind of problems. Existence and non-existence of overtaking optimal controls in various cases are established. Some concrete examples are presented. These results show that the overtaking optimality approach can be used to solve some…
The uniform quadratic optimizatin problem (UQ) is a nonconvex quadratic constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) sharing the same Hessian matrix. Based on the second-order cone programming (SOCP) relaxation, we establish a new sufficient condition to guarantee strong duality for (UQ) and then extend it to (QCQP), which not only covers several well-known results in literature but also partially gives answers to a few open questions. For convex constrained nonconvex (UQ), we propose an improved approximation algorithm based on (SOCP). Our approximation bound is dimensional independent. As an app…
