Resilient Penalty Function Method for Distributed Constrained Optimization under Byzantine Attack

Distributed optimization algorithms have the advantages of privacy protection and parallel computing. However, the distributed nature of these algorithms makes the system vulnerable to external attacks. This paper presents two penalty function based resilient algorithms for constrained distributed optimization under static and dynamic attacks. The objective function of the optimization problem is extended to nonsmooth ones and the convergence of the proposed algorithms in this case are proved under some mild conditions. Simulation experiments are performed and compared with some existing resilient primal-dual optimization algorithms using median-based mean estimator. For static attack, the proposed algorithm has better performance and faster convergence rate in the simulation experiments. For dynamic attack, the proposed algorithm has better performance and robustness in the simulation experiments, which illustrate that the proposed algorithms are more effective. © 2022 Elsevier Inc.