Control Applications of Nonlinear Convex Programming

Since 1984 there has been a concentrated e ort to develop e cient interior-point methods for linear programming (LP). In the last few years researchers have begun to appreciate a very important property of these interior-point methods (beyond their e ciency for LP): they extend gracefully to nonlinear convex optimization problems. New interior-point algorithms for problem classes such as semide nite programming (SDP) or second-order cone programming (SOCP) are now approaching the extreme e ciency of modern linear programming codes. In this paper we discuss three examples of areas of control where our ability to e ciently solve nonlinear convex optimization problems opens up new applications. In the rst example we show how SOCP can be used to solve robust open-loop optimal control problems. In the second example, we show how SOCP can be used to simultaneously design the set-point and feedback gains for a controller, and compare this method with the more standard approach. Our nal application concerns analysis and synthesis via linear matrix inequalities and SDP. Submitted to a special issue of Journal of Process Control, edited by Y. Arkun & S. Shah, for papers presented at the 1997 IFAC Conference on Advanced Process Control, June 1997, Ban . This and related papers available via anonymous FTP at isl.stanford.edu or via WWW at URL http://www-isl.stanford.edu/people/boyd.