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Title: Differentiable McCormick relaxations

Journal Article · · Journal of Global Optimization
 [1];  [2];  [2]
  1. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Lemont, IL (United States)
  2. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)

McCormick's classical relaxation technique constructs closed-form convex and concave relaxations of compositions of simple intrinsic functions. These relaxations have several properties which make them useful for lower bounding problems in global optimization: they can be evaluated automatically, accurately, and computationally inexpensively, and they converge rapidly to the relaxed function as the underlying domain is reduced in size. They may also be adapted to yield relaxations of certain implicit functions and differential equation solutions. However, McCormick's relaxations may be nonsmooth, and this nonsmoothness can create theoretical and computational obstacles when relaxations are to be deployed. This article presents a continuously differentiable variant of McCormick's original relaxations in the multivariate McCormick framework of Tsoukalas and Mitsos. Gradients of the new differentiable relaxations may be computed efficiently using the standard forward or reverse modes of automatic differentiation. Furthermore, extensions to differentiable relaxations of implicit functions and solutions of parametric ordinary differential equations are discussed. A C++ implementation based on the library MC++ is described and applied to a case study in nonsmooth nonconvex optimization.

Research Organization:
Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-06CH11357
OSTI ID:
1373702
Journal Information:
Journal of Global Optimization, Vol. 67, Issue 4; ISSN 0925-5001
Publisher:
SpringerCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 25 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Computationally relevant generalized derivatives: theory, evaluation and applications journal September 2017
Convergence of Subtangent-Based Relaxations of Nonlinear Programs journal April 2019