New exact penalty function for solving constrained finite min-max problems

This paper introduces a new exact and smooth penalty function to tackle constrained min-max problems. By using this new penalty function and adding just one extra variable, a constrained min-max problem is transformed into an unconstrained optimization one. It is proved that, under certain reasonable assumptions and when the penalty parameter is sufficiently large, the minimizer of this unconstrained optimization problem is equivalent to the minimizer of the original constrained one. Numerical results demonstrate that this penalty function method is an effective and promising approach for solving constrained finite min-max problems.