On the finite termination of an entropy function based smoothing Newton method for vertical linear complementarity problems

By using a smooth entropy function to approximate the non-smooth max-type function, a vertical linear complementarity problem (VLCP) can be treated as a family of parameterized smooth equations. A Newton-type method with a testing procedure is proposed to solve such a system. We show that the proposed algorithm finds an exact solution of VLCP in a finite number of iterations, under some conditions milder than those assumed in literature. Some computational results are included to illustrate the potential of this approach.