A NEW METHOD FOR SOLVING MIXED SETS OF EQUALITY AND INEQUALITY CONSTRAINTS

Presented is a general method far solving sets of nonlinear constraint s that include inequalities. Inequality constraints are common in engi neering design problems, such as kinematic synthesis. The proposed met hod uses a modified Newton's method and introduces a slack variable an d a slack constraint to convert each inequality into art equality cons traint. Singular value decomposition is used to find the pseudo-invers e of the Jacobian at each iteration. Benefits of this method are that constraint scaling is not an issue and that the method often fails gra cefully for inconsistent constraint sets by providing direction for mo dification of the constraints so that an answer can be found. The meth od is also competitive with others in terms of the number of function evaluations needed to solve a set of problems taken from the literatur e.