A quasi-newton quadratic penalty method for minimization subject to nonlinear equality constraints

We present a modified quadratic penalty function method for equality constrained optimization problems. The pivotal feature of our algorithm is that at every iterate we invoke a special change of variables to improve the ability of the algorithm to follow the constraint level sets. This change of variables gives rise to a suitable block diagonal approximation to the Hessian which is then used to construct a quasi-Newton method. We show that the complete algorithm is globally convergent. Preliminary computational results are reported.