lpviz: Interactive Linear Programming Visualization
TLDR
lpviz is an interactive, browser-based tool for visualizing linear programming, allowing direct manipulation and comparison of various solver algorithms.
Key contributions
- Directly draw and edit feasible regions and objective vectors without cumbersome numerical input.
- Compares behavior of Simplex, Interior-Point, Primal-Dual Hybrid Gradient, and Central Path algorithms.
- 3D mode visualizes solver metadata like complementarity gap and KKT residual for deeper insight.
Why it matters
lpviz helps users develop intuition for linear programming solvers by allowing direct interaction and comparison of algorithms. It's valuable for both research and educational settings, clarifying solver strengths, weaknesses, and convergence behavior.
Original Abstract
This paper presents lpviz, a browser-based visualization tool for linear programming. lpviz is deeply interactive, offering an intuitive interface where users can directly draw and edit the feasible region and objective vector, without requiring cumbersome manipulation of raw numerical coefficients. lpviz lets users compare the behavior of several classes of linear programming algorithms, namely Simplex, Interior-Point, Primal-Dual Hybrid Gradient, and Central Path. In the 3D mode, lpviz places iterates at heights corresponding to important solver metadata such as complementarity gap or KKT residual, helping users gain further insight into algorithm behavior beyond the primal iterates alone. lpviz has been used in both research and classroom settings, to help develop intuition for the strengths and weaknesses of different solvers and the impact of solver settings on convergence behavior. lpviz is open-source, permissively licensed, and freely available on any device with a web browser at https://lpviz.net .
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