Smoothing Newton method for nonsmooth second-order cone complementarity problems with application to electric power markets

This paper is dedicated to solving a nonsmooth second-order cone complementarity problem, in which the mapping is assumed to be locally Lipschitz continuous, but not necessarily to be continuously differentiable everywhere. With the help of the vector-valued Fischer-Burmeister function associated with second-order cones, the nonsmooth second-order cone complementarity problem can be equivalently transformed into a system of nonsmooth equations. To deal with this reformulated nonsmooth system, we present an approximation function by smoothing the inner mapping and the outer Fischer-Burmeister function simultaneously. Different from traditional smoothing methods, the smoothing parameter introduced is treated as an independent variable. We give some conditions under which the Jacobian of the smoothing approximation function is guaranteed to be nonsingular. Based on these results, we propose a smoothing Newton method for solving the nonsmooth second-order cone complementarity problem and show that the proposed method achieves globally superlinear or quadratic convergence under suitable assumptions. Finally, we apply the smoothing Newton method to a network Nash-Cournot game in oligopolistic electric power markets and report some numerical results to demonstrate its effectiveness.