Comments on the Reliability of Lawson and Hanson's Linear Distance Programming Algorithm: Subroutine LDP

Abstract

This brief paper: (1) Discusses strategies to generate random test cases that can be used to extensively test any Linear Distance Program (LDP) software. (2) Gives three numerical examples of input cases generated by this strategy that cause problems in the Lawson and Hanson LDP module. (3) Proposes, as a standard matter of acceptable implementation procedures, that (unless it is done internally in the software itself, but, in general, this seems to be much rarer than one would expect) all users should test the returned output from any LDP module for self-consistency since it incurs only a small amount of added computational overhead and it is not hard to do.