The method and apparatus adaptively determine weighting factors within the
context of an objective function for handling optimality conditions and
constraints within an optimization search. The objective function is
defined as a sum of credit and penalty components. The credit components
represent the optimality conditions for the problem. The penalty
components represent the constraint violations for the problem.
Initially, each component is made up of a weight multiplied by a
mathematical expression, called a term, that quantifies either an
optimality condition or a constraint violation. The set of credit and
penalty weights are adaptively determined based on the progress of an
optimization search. Both static and dynamic representations of the
modified objective function are used to perform the adaption.