Nonconvex Equilibrium Models for Energy Markets: Exploiting Price Information to Determine the Existence of an Equilibrium

Motivated by examples from the energy sector, we consider market equilibrium problems (MEPs) involving players with nonconvex strategy spaces or objective functions, where the latter are assumed to be linear in market prices. We propose an algorithm that determines if an equilibrium of such an MEP exists and that computes an equilibrium in case of … Read more

Proximal Point Algorithm on the Stiefel Manifold

In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing a continuously differentiable function on the Stiefel manifold. To solve this problem, we develop a geodesic-free proximal point algorithm, which does not require the use of the Riemannian distance. The proposed method can be regarded as an iterative fixed-point method, which repeatedly applies a proximal operator … Read more

ACCELERATING CONVERGENCE OF A GLOBALIZED SEQUENTIAL QUADRATIC PROGRAMMING METHOD TO CRITICAL LAGRANGE MULTIPLIERS

This paper concerns the issue of asymptotic acceptance of the true Hessian and the full step by the sequential quadratic programming algorithm for equality-constrained optimization problems. In order to enforce global convergence, the algorithm is equipped with a standard Armijo linesearch procedure for a nonsmooth exact penalty function. The specificity of considerations here is that … Read more

Homogeneous polynomials and spurious local minima on the unit sphere

We consider degree-d forms on the Euclidean unit sphere. We specialize to our setting a genericity result by Nie obtained in a more general framework. We exhibit an homogeneous polynomial Res in the coefficients of f, such that if Res(f) is not zero then all points that satisfy first- and second-order necessary optimality conditions are … Read more

An augmented Lagrangian method exploiting an active-set strategy and second-order information

In this paper, we consider nonlinear optimization problems with nonlinear equality constraints and bound constraints on the variables. For the solution of such problems, many augmented Lagrangian methods have been defined in the literature. Here, we propose to modify one of these algorithms, namely ALGENCAN by Andreani et al., in such a way to incorporate … Read more

A globally trust-region LP-Newton method for nonsmooth functions under the Hölder metric subregularity

We describe and analyse a globally convergent algorithm to find a possible nonisolated zero of a piecewise smooth mapping over a polyhedral set, such formulation includes Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) systems, variational inequalities problems, and generalized Nash equilibrium problems. Our algorithm is based on a modification of the fast locally convergent Linear Programming (LP)-Newton method with a … Read more

A Unifying Framework for Sparsity Constrained Optimization

In this paper, we consider the optimization problem of minimizing a continuously differentiable function subject to both convex constraints and sparsity constraints. By exploiting a mixed-integer reformulation from the literature, we define a necessary optimality condition based on a tailored neighborhood that allows to take into account potential changes of the support set. We then … Read more

Price Optimization with Practical Constraints

In this paper, we study a retailer price optimization problem which includes the practical constraints: maximum number of price changes and minimum amount of price change (if a change is recommended). We provide a closed-form formula for the Euclidean projection onto the feasible set defined by these two constraints, based on which a simple gradient … Read more

FrankWolfe.jl: a high-performance and flexible toolbox for Frank-Wolfe algorithms and Conditional Gradients

We present FrankWolfe.jl, an open-source implementation of several popular Frank-Wolfe and Conditional Gradients variants for first-order constrained optimization. The package is designed with flexibility and high-performance in mind, allowing for easy extension and relying on few assumptions regarding the user-provided functions. It supports Julia’s unique multiple dispatch feature, and interfaces smoothly with generic linear optimization … Read more

Algorithms for Difference-of-Convex (DC) Programs Based on Difference-of-Moreau-Envelopes Smoothing

In this paper we consider minimization of a difference-of-convex (DC) function with and without linear constraints. We first study a smooth approximation of a generic DC function, termed difference-of-Moreau-envelopes (DME) smoothing, where both components of the DC function are replaced by their respective Moreau envelopes. The resulting smooth approximation is shown to be Lipschitz differentiable, … Read more