Pivot Rules for Linear Programming: A Survey on Recent Theoretical Developments

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the various pivot rules of the simplex method and its variants that have been developed in the last two decades, starting from the appearance of the minimal index rule of Bland. We are mainly concerned with finiteness properties of simplex type pivot rules. Well known classical results concerning the simplex method are not considered in this survey, but the connection between the new pivot methods and the classical ones are discussed if there is any. In this paper we discuss three classes of recently developed pivot rules for linear programming. The first and largest class is the class of essentially combinatorial pivot rules including minimal index type rules and recursive rules. These rules only use labeling and signs of the variables. The second class contains those pivot rules which can actually be considered as variants or generalizations or specializations of Lemke’s method, and so they are closely related to parametric programming. The last class has the common feature that the rules all have close connections to certain interior point methods. Finally, we mention some open problems for future research.