Existence of Local Saddle Points for a New Augmented Lagrangian Function

We give a new class of augmented Lagrangian functions for nonlinear programming problem with both equality and inequality constraints. The close relationship between local saddle points of this new augmented Lagrangian and local optimal solutions is discussed. In particular, we show that a local saddle point is a local optimal solution and the converse is also true under rather mild conditions

New Convergence Properties of the Primal Augmented Lagrangian Method

New convergence properties of the proximal augmented Lagrangian method is established for continuous nonconvex optimization problem with both equality and inequality constrains. In particular, the multiplier sequences are not required to be bounded. Different convergence results are discussed dependent on whether the iterative sequence {xk} generated by algorithm is convergent or divergent. Furthermore, under certain convexity assumption, we show that every accumulation point of {xk} is either a degenerate point or a KKT point of the primal problem. Numerical experiments are presented finally

Decomposition Methods for Global Solutions of Mixed-Integer Linear Programs

This paper introduces two decomposition-based methods for two-block mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs), which break the original problem into a sequence of smaller MILP subproblems. The first method is based on the l1-augmented Lagrangian. The second method is based on the alternating direction method of multipliers. When the original problem has a block-angular structure, the subproblems of the first block have low dimensions and can be solved in parallel. We add reverse-norm cuts and augmented Lagrangian cuts to the subproblems of the second block. For both methods, we show asymptotic convergence to globally optimal solutions and present iteration upper bounds. Numerical comparisons with recent decomposition methods demonstrate the exactness and efficiency of our proposed methods