A Smoothing Newton Method for Semi-Infinite Programming

This paper is concerned with numerical methods for solving a semi-infinite programming problem. We reformulate the equations and nonlinear complementarity conditions of the first order optimality condition of the problem into a system of semismooth equations. By using a perturbed Fischer–Burmeister function, we develop a smoothing Newton method for solving this system of semismooth equations. An advantage of the proposed method is that at each iteration, only a system of linear equations is solved. We prove that under standard assumptions, the iterate sequence generated by the smoothing Newton method converges superlinearly/quadratically.