Parametric variational solution of linear-quadratic optimal control problems with control inequality constraints

A parametric variational principle and the corresponding numerical algo- rithm are proposed to solve a linear-quadratic （LQ） optimal control problem with control inequality constraints. Based on the parametric variational principle, this control prob- lem is transformed into a set of Hamiltonian canonical equations coupled with the linear complementarity equations, which are solved by a linear complementarity solver in the discrete-time domain. The costate variable information is also evaluated by the proposed method. The parametric variational algorithm proposed in this paper is suitable for both time-invariant and time-varying systems. Two numerical examples are used to test the validity of the proposed method. The proposed algorithm is used to astrodynamics to solve a practical optimal control problem for rendezvousing spacecrafts with a finite low thrust. The numerical simulations show that the parametric variational algorithm is ef- fective for LQ optimal control problems with control inequality constraints.

A necessary and sufficient condition of convexity for SOC reformulation of trust-region subproblem with two intersecting cuts

We consider the extended trust-region subproblem with two linear inequalities. In the "nonintersecting" case of this problem, Burer and Yang(2015) have proved that its semi-definite programming relaxation with second-order-cone reformulation(SDPR-SOCR) is a tight relaxation. In the more complicated "intersecting" case, which is discussed in this paper, so far there is no result except for a counterexample for the SDPR-SOCR. We present a necessary and sufficient condition for the SDPR-SOCR to be a tight relaxation in both the "nonintersecting" and "intersecting" cases. As an application of this condition, it is verified easily that the "nonintersecting" SDPR-SOCR is a tight relaxation indeed. Furthermore, as another application of the condition, we prove that there exist at least three regions among the four regions in the trust-region ball divided by the two intersecting linear cuts, on which the SDPR-SOCR must be a tight relaxation. Finally, the results of numerical experiments show that the SDPR-SOCR can work efficiently in decreasing or even eliminating the duality gap of the nonconvex extended trust-region subproblem with two intersecting linear inequalities indeed.

Efficient Algorithms for Generating Truncated Multivariate Normal Distributions

Sampling from a truncated multivariate normal distribution （TMVND） constitutes the core computational module in fitting many statistical and econometric models. We propose two efficient methods, an iterative data augmentation （DA） algorithm and a non-iterative inverse Bayes formulae （IBF） sampler, to simulate TMVND and generalize them to multivariate normal distributions with linear inequality constraints. By creating a Bayesian incomplete-data structure, the posterior step of the DA Mgorithm directly generates random vector draws as opposed to single element draws, resulting obvious computational advantage and easy coding with common statistical software packages such as S-PLUS, MATLAB and GAUSS. Furthermore, the DA provides a ready structure for implementing a fast EM algorithm to identify the mode of TMVND, which has many potential applications in statistical inference of constrained parameter problems. In addition, utilizing this mode as an intermediate result, the IBF sampling provides a novel alternative to Gibbs sampling and elimi- nares problems with convergence and possible slow convergence due to the high correlation between components of a TMVND. The DA algorithm is applied to a linear regression model with constrained parameters and is illustrated with a published data set. Numerical comparisons show that the proposed DA algorithm and IBF sampler are more efficient than the Gibbs sampler and the accept-reject algorithm.