  This work focuses on the iterative solution of sequences of KKT linear
systems arising in interior point methods applied to large convex quadratic
programming problems. This task is the computational core of the interior point
procedure and an efficient preconditioning strategy is crucial for the
efficiency of the overall method. Constraint preconditioners are very effective
in this context; nevertheless, their computation may be very expensive for
large-scale problems, and resorting to approximations of them may be
convenient. Here we propose a procedure for building inexact constraint
preconditioners by updating a "seed" constraint preconditioner computed for a
KKT matrix at a previous interior point iteration. These updates are obtained
through low-rank corrections of the Schur complement of the (1,1) block of the
seed preconditioner. The updated preconditioners are analyzed both
theoretically and computationally. The results obtained show that our updating
procedure, coupled with an adaptive strategy for determining whether to
reinitialize or update the preconditioner, can enhance the performance of
interior point methods on large problems.
