In this paper, we study the existence of local and global saddle points for nonlinear second-order cone programming problems. The existence of local saddle points is developed by using the second-order sufficient conditions, in which a sigma-term is added to reflect the curvature of second-order cone. Furthermore, by dealing with the perturbation of the primal problem, we establish the existence of global saddle points, which can be applicable for the case of multiple optimal solutions. The close relationship between global saddle points and exact penalty representations are discussed as well.

In this paper, we study the properties of the penalized Fischer-Burmeister (FB) second-order cone (SOC) complementarity function. We show that the function possesses similar desirable properties of the FB SOC complementarity function for local convergence; for example, with the function the second-order cone complementarity problem (SOCCP) can be reformulated as a (strongly) semismooth system of equations, and the corresponding nonsmooth Newton method has local quadratic convergence without strict complementarity of solutions. In addition, the penalized FB merit function has bounded level sets under a rather weak condition which can be satisfied by strictly feasible monotone SOCCPs or SOCCPs with the Cartesian <i>R</i> ₀₁-property, although it is not continuously differentiable. Numerical results are included to illustrate the theoretical considerations.

This paper is devoted to the study of the proximal point algorithm for solving monotone second-order cone complementarity problems. The proximal point algorithm is to generate a sequence by solving subproblems that are regularizations of the original problem. After given an appropriate criterion for approximate solutions of subproblems by adopting a merit function, the proximal point algorithm is verified to have global and superlinear convergence properties. For the purpose of solving the subproblems efficiently, we introduce a generalized Newton method and show that only one Newton step is eventually needed to obtain a desired approximate solution that approximately satisfies the appropriate criterion under mild conditions. Numerical comparisons are also made with the derivative-free descent method used by Pan and Chen (Optimization 59:11731197, 2010), which confirm the theoretical results