Solving absolute value equation using complementarity and smoothing functions

In this paper, we reformulate the NP-hard problem of the absolute value equation (AVE) as a horizontal linear complementarity one and then solve it using a smoothing technique. This approach leads to a new class of methods that are valid for general absolute value equation. An asymptotic analysis proves the convergence of our schemes and provides some interesting error estimates. This kind of error bound or estimate had never been studied for other known methods. The corresponding algorithms were tested on randomly generated problems and applications. These experiments show that, in the general case, one observes a reduction of the number of failures.