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A method is proposed to smooth the square-order exact penalty function for inequality constrained optimization. It is shown that, under some conditions, an approximately optimal solution of the original problem can be obtained by searching an approximately optimal solution of the smoothed penalty problem. An algorithm based on the smoothed penalty functions is given. The algorithm is shown to be convergent under mild conditions. Two numerical examples show that the algorithm seems efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The solution of the augmented Lagrangian related system is a key ingredient of many iterative algorithms for the solution of saddle-point problems in constrained optimization with quasi-Newton methods. However, such problems are ill-conditioned when the penalty parameter tends to zero, whereas the error vanishes as . We present a new fast method based on a splitting penalty scheme to solve such problems with a judicious prediction–correction method. We prove that, due to the adapted right-hand side, the solution of the correction step only requires the approximation of operators independent of , when is taken sufficiently small. Hence, the proposed method is as cheaper as tends to zero. We apply the two-step scheme to efficiently solve the saddle-point problem with a penalty method. Indeed, that fully justifies the interest of the vector penalty-projection methods recently proposed by Angot et al. (2008) to solve the unsteady incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, for which we give the stability result and some quasi-optimal error estimates. Moreover, the numerical experiments confirm both the theoretical analysis and the efficiency of the proposed method which produces a fast splitting solution to augmented Lagrangian or penalty problems, possibly used as a suitable preconditioner to the fully coupled system. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We present a method to approximate the solution mapping of parametric constrained optimization problems. The approximation, which is of the spectral finite element type, is represented as a linear combination of orthogonal polynomials. Its coefficients are determined by solving an appropriate finite-dimensional constrained optimization problem. We show that, under certain conditions, the latter problem is solvable because it is feasible for a sufficiently large degree of the polynomial approximation and has an objective function with bounded level sets. In addition, the solutions of the finite-dimensional problems converge for an increasing degree of the polynomials considered, provided that the solutions exhibit a sufficiently large and uniform degree of smoothness. Our approach solves, in the case of optimization problems with uncertain parameters, the most computationally intensive part of stochastic finite-element approaches. We demonstrate that our framework is applicable to parametric eigenvalue problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]