A Computational Comparison of the Ellipsoid Algorithm with Several Nonlinear Programming Algorithms

A computational comparison of several general purpose nonlinear programming algorithms is presented. This study was motivated by the preliminary results in [12] which show that the recently developed ellipsoid algorithm is competitive with a widely used augmented Lagrangian algorithm. To provide a better perspective on the value of ellipsoid algorithms in nonlinear programming, the present study includes some of the most highly regarded nonlinear programming algorithms and is a much more comprehensive study than [12]. The algorithms considered here are chosen from four distinct classes and 50 well-known test problems are used. The algorithms used represent augmented Lagrangian, ellipsoid, generalized reduced gradient, and iterative quadratic programming methods. Results regarding robustness and relative efficiency are presented.