Failure of global convergence for a class of interior point methods for nonlinear programming

Using a simple analytical example, we demonstrate that a class of interior point methods for general nonlinear programming, including some current methods, is not globally convergent. It is shown that those algorithms produce limit points that are neither feasible nor stationary points of some measure of the constraint violation, when applied to a well-posed problem. Received: December 1999 / Accepted: May 2000?Published online August 18, 2000