In mathematical optimization, a quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP) is an optimization problem in which both the objective function and the constraints are quadratic functions. It has the form
where P0, ..., Pm are n-by-n matrices and x ∈ Rn is the optimization variable.
If P0, ..., Pm are all positive semidefinite, then the problem is convex. If these matrices are neither positive nor negative semidefinite, the problem is non-convex. If P1, ... ,Pm are all zero, then the constraints are in fact linear and the problem is a quadratic program.
A convex QCQP problem can be efficiently solved using an interior point method (in a polynomial time), typically requiring around 30-60 iterations to converge. Solving the general non-convex case is an NP-hard problem.
To see this, note that the two constraints x1(x1 − 1) ≤ 0 and x1(x1 − 1) ≥ 0 are equivalent to the constraint x1(x1 − 1) = 0, which is in turn equivalent to the constraint x1 ∈ {0, 1}. Hence, any 0–1 integer program (in which all variables have to be either 0 or 1) can be formulated as a quadratically constrained quadratic program. Since 0–1 integer programming is NP-hard in general, QCQP is also NP-hard.
However, even for a nonconvex QCQP problem a local solution can generally be found with a nonconvex variant of the interior point method. In some cases (such as when solving nonlinear programming problems with a sequential QCQP approach) these local solutions are sufficiently good to be accepted.
There are two main relaxations of QCQP: using semidefinite programming (SDP), and using the reformulation-linearization technique (RLT). For some classes of QCQP problems (precisely, QCQPs with zero diagonal elements in the data matrices), second-order cone programming (SOCP) and linear programming (LP) relaxations providing the same objective value as the SDP relaxation are available.[1]
Nonconvex QCQPs with non-positive off-diagonal elements can be exactly solved by the SDP or SOCP relaxations,[2] and there are polynomial-time-checkable sufficient conditions for SDP relaxations of general QCQPs to be exact.[3] Moreover, it was shown that a class of random general QCQPs has exact semidefinite relaxations with high probability as long as the number of constraints grows no faster than a fixed polynomial in the number of variables.[3]
When P0, ..., Pm are all positive-definite matrices, the problem is convex and can be readily solved using interior point methods, as done with semidefinite programming.
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