Development of Nonlinear Programming Approaches to Large Scale Linear Programming Problems

비선형계획법을 이용한 대규모 선형계획해법의 개발

The concept of criterion function is proposed as a framework for comparing the geometric and computational characteristics of various nonlinear programming approaches to linear programming such as the method of centers, Karmakar's algorithm and the gravitational method. Also, we discuss various computational issues involved in obtaining an efficient parallel implementation of these methods. Clearly, the most time consuming part in solving a linear programming problem is the direction finding procedure, where we obtain an improving direction. In most cases, finding an improving direction is equivalent to solving a simple optimization problem defined at the current feasible solution. Again, this simple optimization problem can be seen as a least squares problem, and the computational effort in solving the least squares problem is, in fact, same as the effort as in solving a system of linear equations. Hence, getting a solution to a system of linear equations fast is very important in solving a linear programming problem efficiently. For solving system of linear equations on parallel computing machines, an iterative method seems more adequate than direct methods. Therefore, we propose one possible strategy for getting an efficient parallel implementation of an iterative method for solving a system of equations and present the summary of computational experiment performed on transputer based parallel computing board installed on IBM PC.