In this paper, we survey the most recent methods that have been developed for the solution of semidefinite programs. We first
concentrate on the methods that have been primarily motivated by the interior point (IP) algorithms for linear programming,
putting special emphasis in the class of primal-dual path-following algorithms. We also survey methods that have been developed
for solving large-scale SDP problems. These include first-order nonlinear programming (NLP) methods and more specialized path-following
IP methods which use the (preconditioned) conjugate gradient or residual scheme to compute the Newton direction and the notion
of matrix completion to exploit data sparsity.
Received: December 16, 2002 / Accepted: May 5, 2003
Published online: May 28, 2003
Key words. semidefinite programming – interior-point methods – polynomial complexity – path-following methods – primal-dual methods
– nonlinear programming – Newton method – first-order methods – bundle method – matrix completion
The author's research presented in this survey article has been supported in part by NSF through grants INT-9600343, INT-9910084,
CCR-9700448, CCR-9902010, CCR-0203113 and ONR through grants N00014-93-1-0234, N00014-94-1-0340 and N00014-03-1-0401.
Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 65K05, 90C06, 90C22, 90C25, 90C30, 90C51