Augmented Lagrangian methods for nonlinear programming with possible infeasibility

In this paper, we consider a nonlinear programming problem for which the constraint set may be infeasible. We propose an algorithm based on a large family of augmented Lagrangian functions and analyze its global convergence properties taking into account the possible infeasibility of the problem. We show that, in a finite number of iterations, the algorithm stops detecting the infeasibility of the problem or finds an approximate feasible/optimal solution with any required precision. We illustrate, by means of numerical experiments, that our algorithm is reliable for different Lagrangian/penalty functions proposed in the literature.