Reformulation of non-differentiable term

In a non-linear programming model with a rather complicated objective I see a term

\[\frac{p}{2}\left(|x| + x\right)\]

that is minimized. It is also noted that \(p>0\).

From a picture of \(y=\displaystyle\frac{|x|+x}{2}\) we can see this is just a more complicated way of writing:

\[p \max\{0,x\}\]

I don’t see much advantage in using the first form. Both these expressions are non-differentiable at \(x=0\). Almost always a better formulation is to replace \(\max\{0,x\}\) by a new positive variable \(y\ge 0\), and add a constraint:

\[y \ge x\]

Although we are making the model slightly larger (we add a variable and an equation) in general this is good trade-off: we now have a simpler, even linear term in the objective.