An objective penalty function method for nonlinear programming

In this paper, we propose a novel objective penalty function for inequality constrained optimization problems. The objective penalty function differs from any existing penalty function and also has two desired features: exactness and smoothness if the constraints and objective function are differentiable. An exact penalty result is proved for the objective penalty function. In addition to these results, based on the objective penalty function, we develop an algorithm for solving the original problem and show its convergence under some mild conditions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]