Algorithms For Bilevel Optimization

General multilevel nonlinear optimization problems arise in design of complex systems and can be used as a means of regularization for multicriteria optimization problems. Here for clarity in displaying our ideas, we restrict ourselves to general bilevel optimization problems, and we present two solution approaches. Both approaches use a trust-region globalization strategy, and they can be easily extended to handle the general multilevel problem. We make no convexity assumptions, but we do assume that the problem has a nondegenerate feasible set. We consider necessary optimality conditions for the bilevel problem formulations and discuss results that can be extended to obtain multilevel optimization formulations with constraints at each level