Convexity Seminar

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On time-periodic branched transport

Speaker: Jun Kitagawa, Michigan State University

Location: Warren Weaver Hall 1302

Date: Tuesday, December 2, 2025, 2:20 p.m.

Synopsis:

The branched transport problem is an optimization problem involving the transportation of one probability measure to another. A major feature is that in optimal trajectories, mass is gathered from source locations to be transported in bulk, then distributed once close to target locations. This is in contrast to the popular Monge-Kantorovich problem, where transport tends to occur along geodesics, and is more commonly seen in biological or logistical models. In this talk, we discuss a version of the branched transport problem where the source and target distributions are allowed to vary with time, in a periodic way. This talk is based on joint work with Cecilia Mikat.