A penalized Fischer-Burmeister NCP-function

We introduce a new NCP-function in order to reformulate the nonlinear compl ementarity problem as a nonsmooth system of equations. This new NCP-functio n turns out to have stronger theoretical properties than the widely used Fi scher-Burmeister function and other NCP-functions suggested previously. Mor eover, numerical experience indicates that a semismooth Newton method based on this new NCP-function performs considerably better than the correspondi ng method based on the Fischer-Burmeister function.