Sensitivity Analysis of Nonlinear Programs and Differentiability Properties of Metric Projections

Abstract

This paper is concerned with a study of differentiability properties of the optimal value function and an associated optimal solution of a parametrized nonlinear program. Second order analysis is presented essentially under the Mangasarian-Fromovitz constraint qualification when the corresponding vector of Lagrange multipliers is not necessarily unique. It is shown that under certain regularity conditions the optimal value function possesses second order directional derivatives and the optimal solution mapping is directionally differentiable. The results obtained are applied to an investigation of metric projections in finite-dimensional spaces.