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arXiv · 2602.23830

A Flow-based Method for Problems with Vanishing Constraints

Christoph Hansknecht·Julian Niederer·Andreas Potschka
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Abstract

Mathematical Programs with Vanishing Constraints (MPVCs) are a notoriously challenging class of problems owing to their lack of constraint qualification. Therefore, to tackle these problems, relaxation-based approaches are typically used. While often yielding satisfactory results, they generally require significant manual tuning and adjustment of the relaxation parameter. To circumvent these problems, we introduce a novel approach based on piecewise gradient flows leading to first-order stationary points. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on several real-world MPVC instances and compare it to a common relaxation approach.

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Christoph Hansknecht, Julian Niederer, Andreas Potschka. 2026-02-27. A Flow-based Method for Problems with Vanishing Constraints. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23830

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