An acceleration technique for methods for finding the nearest point in a polytope and computing the distance between two polytopes

Abstract: We present a simple and efficient acceleration technique for an arbitrary method for computing the Euclidean projection of a point onto a convex polytope, defined as the convex hull of a finite number of points, in the case when the number of points in the polytope is much greater than the dimension of the space. The technique consists in applying any given method to a "small" subpolytope of the original polytope and gradually shifting it, till the projection of the given point onto the subpolytope coincides with its projection onto the original polytope. The results of numerical experiments demonstrate the high efficiency of the proposed acceleration technique. In particular, they show that the reduction of computation time increases with an increase of the number of points in the polytope and is proportional to this number for some methods. In the second part of the paper, we also discuss a straightforward extension of the proposed acceleration technique to the case of arbitrary methods for computing the distance between two convex polytopes, defined as the convex hulls of finite sets of points.