A penalty-type method for relaxed inverse optimal control problems

Abstract

This paper is devoted to the introduction and analysis of a penalty-type method for the numerical treatment of a class of bilevel optimization problems arising from inverse optimal control. The algorithm is designed to compute stationary points of the associated relaxed value function reformulation. This is achieved by determining a sequence of stationary points associated with a sequence of surrogate problems where the relaxed value function constraint is penalized, where the updates of upper- and lower-level decision variables are decoupled, and where the penalty parameter is enlarged only in those iterations which do not come along with a sufficient improvement of some feasibility measure. The resulting method does not comprise any linesearch, the lower-level problem has to be evaluated just once per iteration, and the penalty parameter does not need to be driven to infinity. Nevertheless, subsequential convergence results are obtained under reasonable assumptions. Numerical experiments, where the relaxation parameter is also driven to zero, visualize effectiveness of the approach.