No abstract

We propose an exact penalty approach for solving mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems by converting a general MINLP problem to a finite sequence of nonlinear programming (NLP) problems with only continuous variables. We express conditions of exactness for MINLP problems and show how the exact penalty approach can be extended to constrained problems.

We propose a simple modification to the differentiable penalty methods for solving nonlinear programming problems. This modification decreases the penalty parameter and the ill-conditioning of the penalty method and leads to a faster convergence to the optimal solution. We extend the modification to the augmented Lagrangian method and report some numerical results on several nonlinear programming test problems, showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach