A variational model of irrigation patterns (Q1425684)

This paper gives a general formalism for irrigation patterns. Related to martingale theory the technique allows to define irrigation trees and their vessels to give a generic form to their energy and to show compactness for the irrigation patterns with bounded energy as well as a lower semicontinuity result for the cost functional. A consequence is that volume irrigation problems with a variety of source are well-posed. Minimization problems are also set.