A Parallel Vector-form $LDL^\top$ Decomposition for Accelerating Execution-time-certified $\ell_1$-penalty Soft-constrained MPC

Abstract

Handling possible infeasibility and providing an execution time certificate are two pressing requirements of real-time Model Predictive Control (MPC). To meet these two requirements simultaneously, this paper proposes an $\ell_1$-penalty soft-constrained MPC formulation that is globally feasible and solvable with an execution time certificate using our proposed algorithm. This paper proves for the first time that $\ell_1$-penalty soft-constrained MPC problems can be equivalently transformed into a box-constrained quadratic programming (Box-QP) and then our previous execution-time-certified algorithm \cite{wu2023direct} (only limited to Box-QP) can be applied. However, our previous Box-QP algorithm \cite{wu2023direct}, which provides a theoretical execution-time certificate, is conservative in its iteration analysis, thus sacrificing computation efficiency. To this end, this paper proposes a novel $LDL^\top$ decomposition for the first time, to accelerate the computation of Newton step at each iteration. The speedup of our $LDL^\top$ decomposition comes from two-fold: \textit{i)} exploitation of the fact that the number of inequality constraints is generally larger than the number of variables in condensed MPC formulations, \textit{ii)} vectorized and parallel implementation based on based on its vector-wise operations, instead of element-wise operations of previous decomposition methods. Numerical experiments demonstrate great speedups of the proposed $LDL^\top$ decomposition (even up to 1000-fold, compared to the standard Choleksky method), which thus helps our solver achieve comparable computation performance to the state-of-the-art solvers such as IPOPT and OSQP. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/liangwu2019/L1-penalty-QP}.