Equivalence between some definitions for the optimal mass transport problem and for the transport density on manifolds (Q2505598)

The author considers a mathematical model of the optimal pricing policy for the use of a given transportation network subject to the network, the density of the population and services, and the cost for a citizen to cover a distance without using the transportation network. The city is seen as a convex set of \(\mathbb R^ N\), the network is a Borel set with finite \(1\)-Hausdorff measure, and the densities of the population and services are given by finite Borel measures. To this model there correspond three different definitions of transport densities: the transport density, the work density, and the ``optimal shapes''. Each of these densities is a solution of a suitable variational problem. It is known that in the smooth, Euclidean case they are equivalent. In this paper, the author generalizes the setting of these problems and proves the equivalence of the three variational problems (three definitions of transport densities) and the correspondence between the densities in the very general context of Riemannian manifolds equipped with a Finslerian metric.