Convexification and Concavification for a General Class of Global Optimization Problems

A kind of general convexification and concavification methods is proposed for solving some classes of global optimization problems with certain monotone properties. It is shown that these minimization problems can be transformed into equivalent concave minimization problem or reverse convex programming problem or canonical D.C. programming problem by using the proposed convexification and concavification schemes. The existing algorithms then can be used to find the global solutions of the transformed problems.     

The Dual Functionals for the Generalized Ball Basis of Wang-Said Type and Basis Transformation Formulas

The generalized Ball curves of Wang-Said type with a position parameter L not only unify the Wang-Ball curves and the Said-Ball curves, but also include several useful intermediate curves. This paper presents the dual functionals for the generalized Ball basis of Wang-Said type. The relevant basis transformation formulae are also worked out.     

Convergence and Application of a Decomposition Method Using Duality Bounds for Nonconvex Global Optimization

The subject of this article is a class of global optimization problems, in which the variables can be divided into two groups such that, in each group, the functions involved have the same structure (e.g. linear, convex or concave, etc.). Based on the decomposition idea of Benders (Ref. 1), a corresponding master problem is defined on the space of one of the two groups of variables. The objective function of this master problem is in fact the optimal value function of a nonlinear parametric optimization problem. To solve the resulting master problem, a branch-and-bound scheme is proposed, in which the estimation of the lower bounds is performed by applying the well-known weak duality theorem in Lagrange duality. The results of this article concentrate on two subjects: investigating the convergence of the general algorithm and solving dual problems of some special classes of nonconvex optimization problems. Based on results in sensitivity and stability theory and in parametric optimization, conditions for the convergence are established by investigating the so-called dual properness property and the upper semicontinuity of the objective function of the master problem. The general algorithm is then discussed in detail for some nonconvex problems including concave minimization problems with a special structure, general quadratic problems, optimization problems on the efficient set, and linear multiplicative programming problems.     

Lagrange Duality and Partitioning Techniques in Nonconvex Global Optimization

It is shown that, for very general classes of nonconvex global optimization problems, the duality gap obtained by solving a corresponding Lagrangian dual in reduced to zero in the limit when combined with suitably refined partitioning of the feasible set. A similar result holds for partly convex problems where exhaustive partitioning is applied only in the space of nonconvex variables. Applications include branch-and-bound approaches for linearly constrained problems where convex envelopes can be computed, certain generalized bilinear problems, linearly constrained optimization of the sum of ratios of affine functions, and concave minimization under reverse convex constraints.