Exact Complexity Certification of a Standard Primal Active-Set Method for Quadratic Programming

Model Predictive Control (MPC) requires an optimization problem to be solved at each time step. For real-time MPC, it is important to solve these problems efficiently and to have good upper bounds on how long time the solver needs to solve them. Often for linear MPC problems, the optimization problem in question is a quadratic program (QP) that depends on parameters such as system states and reference signals. A popular class of methods for solving QPs is primal active-set methods, where a sequence of equality constrained QP subproblems are solved. This paper presents a method for computing which sequence of subproblems a primal active-set method will solve, for every parameter of interest in the parameter space. Knowledge about exactly which sequence of subproblems that will be solved can be used to compute a worst-case bound on how many iterations, and ultimately the maximum time, the active-set solver needs to converge to the solution. Furthermore, this information can be used to tailor the solver for the specific control task. The usefulness of the proposed method is illustrated on a set of MPC problems, where the exact worst-case number of iterations a primal active-set method requires to reach optimality is computed.