A soft approach for hard continuous optimization

• DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2005.01.004
• Publication Date: 2005-02-27T00:44:46Z
• Authors: Chunhui Xu; Peggy Ng
• Keywords: 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology

Abstract This paper is to introduce a soft approach for solving continuous optimizations models where seeking an optimal solution is theoretically or practically impossible. We first review methods for solving continuous optimization models, and argue that only a few optimization models with some good structure are solved. To solve a larger class of optimization problems, we suggest a soft approach by softening the goal in solving a model, and propose a two-stage process for implementing the soft approach. Furthermore, we offer an algorithm for solving optimization models with a convex feasible set, and verify the validity of the soft approach with numerical experiments.