A Tutorial on Convex Optimization Haitham Hindi Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Palo Alto, California email:
[email protected] Abstract— In recent years, convex optimization has be- quickly deduce the convexity (and hence tractabil- come a computational tool of central importance in engi- ity) of many problems, often by inspection; neering, thanks to it’s ability to solve very large, practical 2) to review and introduce some canonical opti- engineering problems reliably and efficiently. The goal of this tutorial is to give an overview of the basic concepts of mization problems, which can be used to model convex sets, functions and convex optimization problems, so problems and for which reliable optimization code that the reader can more readily recognize and formulate can be readily obtained; engineering problems using modern convex optimization. 3) to emphasize modeling and formulation; we do This tutorial coincides with the publication of the new book not discuss topics like duality or writing custom on convex optimization, by Boyd and Vandenberghe [7], who have made available a large amount of free course codes. material and links to freely available code. These can be We assume that the reader has a working knowledge of downloaded and used immediately by the audience both linear algebra and vector calculus, and some (minimal) for self-study and to solve real problems. exposure to optimization. Our presentation is quite informal. Rather than pro- I. INTRODUCTION vide details for all the facts and claims presented, our Convex optimization can be described as a fusion goal is instead to give the reader a flavor for what is of three disciplines: optimization [22], [20], [1], [3], possible with convex optimization.