General semi-infinite programming: critical point theory

We study General Semi-Infinite Programming (GSIP) from a topological point of view. Under the Symmetric Mangasarian–Fromovitz Constraint Qualification (Sym-MFCQ) two basic theorems from Morse theory (deformation theorem and cell-attachment theorem) are proved. Outside the set of Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) points, continuous deformation of lower level sets can be performed. As a consequence, the topological data (such as the number of connected components) then remain invariant. However, when passing a KKT level, the topology of the lower level set changes via the attachment of a q-dimensional cell. The dimension q equals the so-called GSIP-index of the (nondegenerate) KKT-point. Here, the Nonsmooth Symmetric Reduction Ansatz (NSRA) allows to perform a local reduction of GSIP to a Disjunctive Optimization Problem. The GSIP-index then coincides with the stationary index from the corresponding Disjunctive Optimization Problem.