Problems of optimal transportation on the circle and their mechanical applications (Q729953)

In this paper, the authors consider a mechanical problem concerning a \(2\)-dimensional axisymmetric body moving forward in the plane, with its symmetry axis slowly oscillating about the direction of motion. The body has a blunt nose, meaning that the front part of the body's boundary is a line segment orthogonal to the symmetry axis. By making small hollows on the segment, the goal is to reduce the resulting resistance of the body. The problem is to find the shape of the hollows that minimizes the resistance. This mechanical problem is equivalent with solving a special problem of optimal transportation. The authors provide a new exactly solvable one-dimensional problem with the initial and final mass distributions having monotone decreasing densities and being supported on segments, and with the cost of transportation being \(f(x+y)\), where \(f\) is an odd function and is convex on \(\mathbb R^+\). A particular case of this problem reduces to a mass transportation on the circle with the transportation cost equal to the squared distance. The study of the problem is based on finding all cost-monotone transport plans which are either singletons or \(1\)- or \(2\)-parameter families. In the first case this singleton represents the solution, and in the other case the solution is extracted from the family by minimizing a function of one or two variables.