Optimal control of diffusive mean-field models for swarming particles on the sphere

Abstract

We study a mean-field optimal control problem for a consensus (high-dimensional Kuramoto-type) dynamics with diffusion on the unit sphere. The control acts through a prescribed drift field and an interaction gain, and the cost functional is given to track a given target density while penalizing the control effort. At the microscopic level, we formulate the corresponding controlled $N$-particle Liouville problem and establish the existence of optimal controls. For fixed controls, we obtain a quantitative stochastic mean-field limit showing that the one-particle marginal converges to the mean-field solution with the convergence rate $\mathcal O(1/\sqrt{N})$. Finally, we show that microscopic optimal controls approximate a mean-field optimal control: any weak limit of particle-level minimizers is optimal for the mean-field problem.