Recently, an important research activity on mean field games (MFGs for short) has been initiated by the pioneering works of Lasry and Lions: it aims at studying the asymptotic behavior of stochastic differential games (Nash equilibria) as the number $n$ of agents tends to infinity. The field is now rapidly growing in several directions, including stochastic optimal control, analysis of PDEs, calculus of variations, numerical analysis and computing, and the potential applications to economics and social sciences are numerous.
In the limit when $n \to +\infty$, a given agent feels the presence of the others through the statistical distribution of the states. Assuming that the perturbations of a single agent's strategy does not influence the statistical states distribution, the latter acts as a parameter in the control problem to be solved by each agent. When the dynamics of the agents are independent stochastic processes, MFGs naturally lead to a coupled system of two partial differential equations (PDEs for short), a forward Fokker-Planck equation and a backward Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation.
The latter system of PDEs has closed form solutions in very few cases only. Therefore, numerical simulation are crucial in order to address applications. The present mini-course will be devoted to numerical methods that can be used to approximate the systems of PDEs.
The numerical schemes that will be presented rely basically on monotone approximations of the Hamiltonian and on a suitable weak formulation of the Fokker-Planck equation.
These schemes have several important features:

- The discrete problem has the same structure as the continous one, so existence, energy estimates, and possibly uniqueness can be obtained with the same kind of arguments

- Monotonicity guarantees the stability of the scheme: it is robust in the deterministic limit

- convergence to classical or weak solutions can be proved

Finally, there are particular cases named variational MFGS in which the system of PDEs can be seen as the optimality conditions of some optimal control problem driven by a PDE. In such cases, augmented Lagrangian methods can be used for solving the discrete nonlinear system. The mini-course will be orgamized as follows

1. Introduction to the system of PDEs and its interpretation. Uniqueness of classical solutions.

2. Monotone finite difference schemes

3. Examples of applications

4. Variational MFG and related algorithms for solving the discrete system of nonlinear equations[-]

Recently, an important research activity on mean field games (MFGs for short) has been initiated by the pioneering works of Lasry and Lions: it aims at studying the asymptotic behavior of stochastic differential games (Nash equilibria) as the number $n$ of agents tends to infinity. The field is now rapidly growing in several directions, including stochastic optimal control, analysis of PDEs, calculus of variations, numerical analysis and computing, and the potential applications to economics and social sciences are numerous.
In the limit when $n \to +\infty$, a given agent feels the presence of the others through the statistical distribution of the states. Assuming that the perturbations of a single agent's strategy does not influence the statistical states distribution, the latter acts as a parameter in the control problem to be solved by each agent. When the dynamics of the agents are independent stochastic processes, MFGs naturally lead to a coupled system of two partial differential equations (PDEs for short), a forward Fokker-Planck equation and a backward Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation.
The latter system of PDEs has closed form solutions in very few cases only. Therefore, numerical simulation are crucial in order to address applications. The present mini-course will be devoted to numerical methods that can be used to approximate the systems of PDEs.
The numerical schemes that will be presented rely basically on monotone approximations of the Hamiltonian and on a suitable weak formulation of the Fokker-Planck equation.
These schemes have several important features:

- The discrete problem has the same structure as the continous one, so existence, energy estimates, and possibly uniqueness can be obtained with the same kind of arguments

- Monotonicity guarantees the stability of the scheme: it is robust in the deterministic limit

- convergence to classical or weak solutions can be proved

Finally, there are particular cases named variational MFGS in which the system of PDEs can be seen as the optimality conditions of some optimal control problem driven by a PDE. In such cases, augmented Lagrangian methods can be used for solving the discrete nonlinear system. The mini-course will be orgamized as follows

1. Introduction to the system of PDEs and its interpretation. Uniqueness of classical solutions.

2. Monotone finite difference schemes

3. Examples of applications

4. Variational MFG and related algorithms for solving the discrete system of nonlinear equations[-]

Recently, an important research activity on mean field games (MFGs for short) has been initiated by the pioneering works of Lasry and Lions: it aims at studying the asymptotic behavior of stochastic differential games (Nash equilibria) as the number $n$ of agents tends to infinity. The field is now rapidly growing in several directions, including stochastic optimal control, analysis of PDEs, calculus of variations, numerical analysis and computing, and the potential applications to economics and social sciences are numerous.
In the limit when $n \to +\infty$, a given agent feels the presence of the others through the statistical distribution of the states. Assuming that the perturbations of a single agent's strategy does not influence the statistical states distribution, the latter acts as a parameter in the control problem to be solved by each agent. When the dynamics of the agents are independent stochastic processes, MFGs naturally lead to a coupled system of two partial differential equations (PDEs for short), a forward Fokker-Planck equation and a backward Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation.
The latter system of PDEs has closed form solutions in very few cases only. Therefore, numerical simulation are crucial in order to address applications. The present mini-course will be devoted to numerical methods that can be used to approximate the systems of PDEs.
The numerical schemes that will be presented rely basically on monotone approximations of the Hamiltonian and on a suitable weak formulation of the Fokker-Planck equation.
These schemes have several important features:

- The discrete problem has the same structure as the continous one, so existence, energy estimates, and possibly uniqueness can be obtained with the same kind of arguments

- Monotonicity guarantees the stability of the scheme: it is robust in the deterministic limit

- convergence to classical or weak solutions can be proved

Finally, there are particular cases named variational MFGS in which the system of PDEs can be seen as the optimality conditions of some optimal control problem driven by a PDE. In such cases, augmented Lagrangian methods can be used for solving the discrete nonlinear system. The mini-course will be orgamized as follows

1. Introduction to the system of PDEs and its interpretation. Uniqueness of classical solutions.

2. Monotone finite difference schemes

3. Examples of applications

4. Variational MFG and related algorithms for solving the discrete system of nonlinear equations[-]

The theory of mean field type control (or control of MacKean-Vlasov) aims at describing the behaviour of a large number of agents using a common feedback control and interacting through some mean field term. The solution to this type of control problem can be seen as a collaborative optimum. We will present the system of partial differential equations (PDE) arising in this setting: a forward Fokker-Planck equation and a backward Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. They describe respectively the evolution of the distribution of the agents' states and the evolution of the value function. Since it comes from a control problem, this PDE system differs in general from the one arising in mean field games.
Recently, this kind of model has been applied to crowd dynamics. More precisely, in this talk we will be interested in modeling congestion effects: the agents move but try to avoid very crowded regions. One way to take into account such effects is to let the cost of displacement increase in the regions where the density of agents is large. The cost may depend on the density in a non-local or in a local way. We will present one class of models for each case and study the associated PDE systems. The first one has classical solutions whereas the second one has weak solutions. Numerical results based on the Newton algorithm and the Augmented Lagrangian method will be presented.
This is joint work with Yves Achdou.[-]

Nonlocal interaction energies are continuum models for large systems of particles, where typically each particle interacts not only with its immediate neighbors, but also with particles that are far away. Examples of these energies arise in many different applications, such as biology (population dynamics), physics (Ginzburg-Landau vortices), and material science (dislocation theory). A fundamental question is understanding the optimal arrangement of particles at equilibrium, which are described, at least in average, by minimizers of the energy. In this talk I will focus on a class of nonlocal energies that are perturbations of the Coulomb energy and I will show how their minimizers can be explicitly characterized. This is based on joint works with J. Mateu, L. Rondi, L. Scardia, and J. Verdera.[-]

In this lecture we shall present some recent results in collaboration with B. Geshkovski (MIT) on the design of optimal sensors and actuators for control systems. We shall mainly focus in the finite-dimensional case, using the Brunovsky normal form. This allows to reformulate the problem in a purely matricial context, which permits rewriting the problem as a minimization problem of the norm of the inverse of a change of basis matrix, and allows us to stipulate the existence of minimizers, as well as non-uniqueness, due to an invariance of the cost with respect to orthogonal transformations. We will present several numerical experiments to both visualize these artifacts and also point out towards further directions and open problems, in particular in the context of PDE infinite-dimensional models.[-]