Assessing the reliability of general-purpose Inexact Restoration methods

Inexact Restoration methods have been proved to be effective to solve constrained optimization problems in which some structure of the feasible set induces a natural way of recovering feasibility from arbitrary infeasible points. Sometimes natural ways of dealing with minimization over tangent approximations of the feasible set are also employed. A recent paper Banihashemi and Kaya (2013)] suggests that the Inexact Restoration approach can be competitive with well-established nonlinear programming solvers when applied to certain control problems without any problem-oriented procedure for restoring feasibility. This result motivated us to revisit the idea of designing general-purpose Inexact Restoration methods, especially for large-scale problems. In this paper we introduce affordable algorithms of Inexact Restoration type for solving arbitrary nonlinear programming problems and we perform the first experiments that aim to assess their reliability. Initially, we define a purely local Inexact Restoration algorithm with quadratic convergence. Then, we modify the local algorithm in order to increase the chances of success of both the restoration and the optimization phase. This hybrid algorithm is intermediate between the local algorithm and a globally convergent one for which, under suitable assumptions, convergence to KKT points can be proved28