New Exact Penalty Functions for Nonlinear Constrained Optimization Problems

For two kinds of nonlinear constrained optimization problems, we propose two simple penalty functions, respectively, by augmenting the dimension of the primal problem with a variable that controls the weight of the penalty terms. Both of the penalty functions enjoy improved smoothness. Under mild conditions, it can be proved that our penalty functions are both exact in the sense that local minimizers of the associated penalty problem are precisely the local minimizers of the original constrained problem.