Piecewise convex programs

Abstract

A piecewise convex program is a convex program such that the constraint set can be decomposed in a finite number of closed convex sets, called the cells of the decomposition, and such that on each of these cells the objective function can be described by a continuously differentiable convex function. In a first part, a cutting hyperplane method is proposed, which successively considers the various cells of the decomposition, checks whether the cell contains an optimal solution to the problem, and, if not, imposes a convexity cut which rejects the whole cell from the feasibility region. This elimination, which is basically a dual decomposition method but with an efficient use of the specific structure of the problem is shown to be finitely convergent. The second part of this paper is devoted to the study of some special cases of piecewise convex program and in particular the piecewise quadratic program having a polyhedral constraint set. Such a program arises naturally in stochastic quadratic programming with recourse, which is the subject of the last section.