Hemivariational inequality approach to constrained problems for star-shaped admissible sets

The hemivariational inequality approach is applied to establish the existence of solutions to a large class of nonconvex constrained problems in a reflexive Banach space. The admissible sets are supposed to be star-shaped with respect to a ball. Due to a discontinuity property of the Clarke directional differential related to the corresponding distance functions, the proposed method permits one to attain the solution without passing to zero with the penalization parameter. Some applications to nonconvex constrained variational problems illustrate the theory.