Characterizing Nonemptiness and Compactness of the Solution Set of a Convex Vector Optimization Problem with Cone Constraints and Applications.

In this paper, we characterize the nonemptiness and compactness of the set of weakly efficient solutions of a convex vector optimization problem with cone constraints in terms of the level-boundedness of the component functions of the objective on the perturbed sets of the original constraint set. This characterization is then applied to carry out the asymptotic analysis of a class of penalization methods. More specifically, under the assumption of nonemptiness and compactness of the weakly efficient solution set, we prove the existence of a path of weakly efficient solutions to the penalty problem and its convergence to a weakly efficient solution of the original problem. Furthermore, for any efficient point of the original problem, there exists a path of efficient solutions to the penalty problem whose function values (with respect to the objective function of the original problem) converge to this efficient point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]