Duality and existence theory for nondifferentiable programming

Necessary and sufficient conditions of optimality are given for a nonlinear nondifferentiable program, where the constraints are defined via closed convex cones and their polars. These results are then used to obtain an existence theorem for the corresponding stationary point problem, under some convexity and regularity conditions on the functions involved, which also guarantee an optimal solution to the programming problem. Furthermore, a dual problem is defined, and a strong duality theorem is obtained under the assumption that the constraint sets of the primal and dual problems are nonempty.