Analysis of a non-interior continuation method for second-order cone programming

Based on the Chen-Harker-Kanzow-Smale (CHKS) smoothing function, a non-interior continuation method is presented for solving the second-order cone programming (SOCP). Our algorithm reformulates the SOCP as a nonlinear system of equations and then applies Newton's method to the perturbation of this system. The proposed algorithm does not have restrictions regarding its starting point and solves at most one linear system of equations at each iteration. Under suitable assumptions, the algorithm is shown to be globally and locally quadratically convergent. Some numerical results are also included which indicate that our algorithm is promising and comparable to interior-point methods. © 2008 KSCAM and Springer-Verlag.