Fourier Galerkin approximation of mean field control problems

The purpose of this work is to provide a finite dimensional approximation of the solution to a mean field optimal control problem set on the d-dimensional torus. The approximation is obtained by means of a Fourier–Galerkin method, the main principle of which is to convolve probability measures on the torus by the Dirichlet kernel or, equivalently, to truncate the Fourier expansion of probability measures on the torus. However, this operation has the main feature not to leave the space of probability measures invariant, which drawback is know as Gibbs’ phenomenon. In spite of this, we manage to prove that, for initial conditions in the ‘interior’ of the space of probability measures and for sufficiently large levels of truncation, the Fourier–Galerkin method induces a new finite dimensional control problem whose trajectories take values in the space of probability measures with a finite number of Fourier coefficients. Our main result asserts that, whenever the cost functionals are smooth and convex, the distance between the optimal trajectories of the original and approximating control problems decreases at a polynomial rate as the index of truncation in the Fourier–Galerkin method tends to \(\infty \) $\infty$ . A similar result holds for the distance between the corresponding value functions. From a practical point of view, our approach provides an efficient strategy to approximate mean field control optimizers by finite dimensional parameters and opens new perspectives for the numerical analysis of mean field control problems. It may be also applied to discretize more general mean field game systems.