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.

Recently there have two different effective methods proposed by Kanzow et al. in (Kanzow, 2001 [8]) and (Kanzow and Petra, 2004 [9]), respectively, which commonly use the FischerBurmeister (FB) function to recast the mixed complementarity problem (MCP) as a constrained minimization problem and a nonlinear system of equations, respectively. They all remark that their algorithms may be improved if the FB function is replaced by other NCP functions. Accordingly, in this paper, we employ the generalized FischerBurmeister (GFB) where the 2-norm in the FB function is relaxed to a general p-norm (p> 1) for the two methods and investigate how much the improvement is by changing the parameter p as well as which method is influenced more when we do so, by the performance profiles of iterations and function evaluations for the two methods with different p on MCPLIB collection.

This paper proposes a neural network approach for efficiently solving general nonlinear convex programs with second-order cone constraints. The proposed neural network model was developed based on a smoothed natural residual merit function involving an unconstrained minimization reformulation of the complementarity problem. We study the existence and convergence of the trajectory of the neural network. Moreover, we show some stability properties for the considered neural network, such as the Lyapunov stability, asymptotic stability, and exponential stability. The examples in this paper provide a further demonstration of the effectiveness of the proposed neural network. This paper can be viewed as a follow-up version of [20], [26] because more stability results are obtained.

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