Absolute Value Equation Solution Via Linear Programming

By utilizing a dual complementarity property, we propose a new linear programming method for solving the NP-hard absolute value equation (AVE): Ax-|x|=b, where A is an nxn square matrix. The algorithm makes no assumptions on the AVE other than solvability and consists of solving a few linear programs, typically less than four. The algorithm was tested on 500 consecutively generated random solvable instances of the AVE with n=10, 50, 100, 500 and 1000. The algorithm solved 100 % of the test problems to an accuracy of 10(-8) by solving an average of 3.3 linear programs per AVE problem.