lpviz: Interactive Linear Programming Visualization
Provides an accessible, interactive visualization tool for educators and researchers to understand linear programming algorithms, but is an incremental tool rather than a novel algorithmic contribution.
lpviz is an interactive browser-based tool for visualizing linear programming, allowing users to draw and edit feasible regions and objective vectors, and compare multiple algorithms (Simplex, Interior-Point, PDHG, Central Path) in 2D and 3D. It has been used in research and education to build intuition about solver behavior.
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 .