Vijay Shilpiekandula

A Parallel Quadratic Programming Algorithm for Model Predictive Control

Abstract In this paper, an iterative multiplicative algorithm is proposed for the fast solution of quadratic programming (QP) problems that arise in the real-time implementation of Model Predictive Control (MPC). The proposed algorithm — Parallel Quadratic Programming ( PQP ) — is amenable to fine-grained parallelization. Conditions on the convergence of the PQP algorithm are given and proved. Due to its extreme simplicity, even serial implementations offer considerable speed advantages. To demonstrate, PQP is applied to several simulation examples, including a stand-alone QP problem and two MPC examples. When implemented in MATLAB using single-thread computations, numerical simulations of PQP demonstrate a 5 – 10x speed-up compared to the MATLAB active-set based QP solver quadprog. A parallel implementation would offer a further speed-up, linear in the number of parallel processors.