An entropic regularization approach for mathematical programs with equilibrium constraints

A new smoothing approach based on entropic regularization is proposed for solving a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints (MPEC). With some known smoothing properties of the entropy function and keeping real practice in mind, we reformulate an MPEC problem as a smooth nonlinear programming problem. In this way, a difficult MPEC problem becomes solvable by using available nonlinear optimization software. To support our claims, we use an online solver and test the performance of the proposed approach on a set of well-known test problems.