A penalty method for solving bilevel linear fractional/linear programming problems

Bilevel programming involves two optimization problems where the constraint region of the first-level problem is implicitly determined by another optimization problem. This model has been applied to decentralized planning problems involving a decision process with a hierarchical structure. In this paper, we consider the bilevel linear fractional/linear programming problem, in which the objective function of the first level is linear fractional, the objective function of the second level is linear, and the common constraint region is a polyhedron. For this problem, taking into account the relationship between the optimization problem of the second level and its dual, a global optimization approach is proposed that uses an exact penalty function based on the duality gap of the second-level problem.