In nonlinearly constrained optimization, penalty methods provide an effective strategy for handling equality constraints, while barrier methods provide an effective approach for the treatment of inequality constraints. A new algorithm for nonlinear optimization is proposed based on minimizing a shifted primal-dual penalty-barrier function. Certain global convergence properties are established. In particular, it is shown that a limit point of the sequence of iterates may always be found that is either an infeasible stationary point or a complementary approximate Karush-Kuhn-Tucker point , i.e., it satisfies reasonable stopping criteria and is a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker point under the cone continuity property , which is the weakest constraint qualification associated with sequential optimality conditions. It is also shown that under suitable additional assumptions, the method is equivalent to a shifted variant of the primal-dual path-following method in the neighborhood of a solution. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the performance of the method.
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