In contrast to the generalized FischerBurmeister function that is a natural extension of the popular FischerBurmeister function NCP-function, the generalized natural residual NCP-function based on discrete extension, recently proposed by Chen, Ko, and Wu, does not possess symmetric graph. In this paper we symmetrize the generalized natural residual NCP-function, and construct not only new NCP-functions and merit functions for the nonlinear complementarity problem, but also provide parallel functions to the generalized FischerBurmeister function.

In this paper, we consider complementarity problem associated with circular cone, which is a type of nonsymmetric cone complementarity problem. The main purpose of this paper is to show the readers how to construct complementarity functions for such nonsymmetric cone complementarity problem, and propose a few merit functions for solving such a complementarity problem. In addition, we study the conditions under which the level sets of the corresponding merit functions are bounded, and we also show that these merit functions provide an error bound for the circular cone complementarity problem. These results ensure that the sequence generated by descent methods has at least one accumulation point, and build up a theoretical basis for designing the merit function method for solving circular cone complementarity problem.

In the solution methods of the symmetric cone complementarity problem (SCCP), the squared norm of a complementarity function serves naturally as a merit function for the problem itself or the equivalent system of equations reformulation. In this paper, we study the growth behavior of two classes of such merit functions, which are induced by the smooth EP complementarity functions and the smooth implicit Lagrangian complementarity function, respectively. We show that, for the linear symmetric cone complementarity problem (SCLCP), both the EP merit functions and the implicit Lagrangian merit function are coercive if the underlying linear transformation has the <i>P</i>-property; for the general SCCP, the EP merit functions are coercive only if the underlying mapping has the uniform Jordan <i>P</i>-property, whereas the coerciveness of the implicit Lagrangian merit function requires an additional condition for the

We consider a class of derivative-free descent methods for solving the second-order cone complementarity problem (SOCCP). The algorithm is based on the FischerBurmeister (FB) unconstrained minimization reformulation of the SOCCP, and utilizes a convex combination of the negative partial gradients of the FB merit function _FB as the search direction. We establish the global convergence results of the algorithm under monotonicity and the uniform Jordan <i>P</i>-property, and show that under strong monotonicity the merit function value sequence generated converges at a linear rate to zero. Particularly, the rate of convergence is dependent on the structure of second-order cones. Numerical comparisons are also made with the limited BFGS method used by Chen and Tseng (<i>An unconstrained smooth minimization reformulation of the second-order cone complementarity problem</i>, Math. Program. 104(2005), pp

It has been an open question whether the family of merit functions $\psi _p\(p&gt; 1) $, the generalized Fischer-Burmeister (FB) merit function, associated to the second-order cone is smooth or not. In this paper we answer it partly, and show that \psi _p is smooth for \psi _p , and we provide the condition for its coerciveness. Numerical results are reported to illustrate the influence of \psi _p on the performance of the merit function method based on \psi _p .