Numerical solution of the Monge–Kantorovich problem by density lift-up continuation

Abstract

We present an iterative method to numerically solve the L² Monge-Kantorovich problem. The method is based on a Picard fixed point iteration of the linearized problem. Examples relative to the transport of two-dimensional densities show that the present method can significantly reduce the computational time over existing methods, especially when the Wasserstein distance between the densities is small.