Subdifferential analysis of bivariate separately regular functions (Q914144)

This paper concerns bivariate functions defined on a product \(X\times Y\) of two spaces. The product structure allows to introduce new classes of separately regular functions which contain the class of upper regular function and enjoy properties similar to the last ones. Besides the exact subdifferential calculus rules these classes appear as natural generalizations of convex-concave or convex-convex functions. Section 1 presents some properties and a characterization of upper regular functions. Section 2 introduces the classes of separately regular functions and establishes some stability properties of these classes. Characterizations of these regularities are given in Section 3 as well as the relationship between the Clarke directional derivative and partial directional derivatives. It is also proved in this section that the undesirable property mentioned in the first section does not hold for these functions. Exact subdifferential calculus rules are the subject of Section 4; in particular it is proved that the usual subdifferential (in the sense of convex analysis) of a saddle function coincides with the generalized gradient of that function. Finally the D-representation of the generalized gradient of separately regular functions is studied in Section 5.