A Newton method for solving continuous multiple material minimum compliance problems

This paper presents an implementation of an active-set line-search Newton method intended for solving large-scale instances of a class of multiple material minimum compliance problems. The problem is modeled with a convex objective function and linear constraints. At each iteration of the Newton method, one or two linear saddle point systems are solved. These systems involve the Hessian of the objective function, which is both expensive to compute and completely dense. Therefore, the linear algebra is arranged such that the Hessian is not explicitly formed. The main concern is to solve a sequence of closely related problems appearing as the continuous relaxations in a nonlinear branch and bound framework for solving discrete minimum compliance problems. A test-set consisting of eight discrete instances originating from the design of laminated composite structures is presented. Computational experiments with a branch and bound method indicate that the proposed Newton method can, on most instances in the test-set, take advantage of the available starting point information in an enumeration tree and resolve the relaxations after branching with few additional function evaluations. Discrete feasible designs are obtained by a rounding heuristic. Designs with provably good objective functions are presented.