Combined Primal–Dual and Penalty Methods for Convex Programming

In this paper we propose and analyze a class of combined primal–dual and penalty methods for constrained minimization which generalizes the method of multipliers. We provide a convergence and rate of convergence analysis for these methods for the case of a convex programming problem. We prove global convergence in the presence of both exact and inexact unconstrained minimization, and we show that the rate of convergence may be linear or superlinear with arbitrary Q-order of convergence depending on the problem at hand and the form of the penalty function employed.