Abstract: Practical applications in multidisciplinary engineering design, business management, and military planning require distributed solution approaches for solving nonconvex, multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs). Under this motivation, a quadratic scalarization method (QSM) is developed with the goal to preserve decomposable structures of the MOP while addressing nonconvexity in a manner that avoids a high degree of nonlinearity and the introduction of additional nonsmoothness.

Under mild assumptions, necessary and sufficient conditions for QSM-generated solutions to be weakly and properly efficient for an MOP are developed, with any form of efficiency being understood in a local sense. QSM is shown to correspond with the relaxed, reformulated weighted-Chebyshev method as a special case. An example is provided for demonstrating the application of QSM to a nonconvex MOP.