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Distributed Interior-point Method for Loosely Coupled Problems

In this paper, we put forth distributed algorithms for solving loosely coupled unconstrained and constrained optimization problems. Such problems are usually solved using algorithms that are based on a combination of decomposition and first order methods. These algorithms are commonly very slow and require many iterations to converge. In order to alleviate this issue, we propose algorithms that combine the Newton and interior-point methods with proximal splitting methods for solving such problems. Particularly, the algorithm for solving unconstrained loosely coupled problems, is based on Newton's method and utilizes proximal splitting to distribute the computations for calculating the Newton step at each iteration. A combination of this algorithm and the interior-point method is then used to introduce a distributed algorithm for solving constrained loosely coupled problems. We also provide guidelines on how to implement the proposed methods efficiently and briefly discuss the properties of the resulting solutions.