Design Exploration and Implementation of Simplex Algorithm over Reconfigurable Computing Platforms

Linear programming (LP) is an important tool for many inter-disciplinary optimization problems. The Simplex method is the most widely used algorithm to solve LP problems and has immense impact on several developments in various fields. With development of public domain and commercial software solvers, it has been automated and made available for use. A serious bottleneck in implementation of Simplex algorithm is the efficient implementation over application-specific processors and parallel hardware platforms such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays. Such implementation could result in drastic speed up in execution of linear programming models. In this paper, we implement Simplex algorithm over FPGA with both low-level design language namely VHDL and high-level design and modeling packages for hardware generation. In addition, we have also modeled the design in Simulink to serve as an intermediate design for migration from software to hardware. A comparison with existing works promises large speed-ups. KeywordsLinear Programming; Simplex; Simulink; Xilinx System Generator; VHDL programming;