Crowd Motion Paradigm Modeled by a Bilevel Sweeping Control Problem

This article concerns an optimal crowd motion control problem in which the crowd features a structure given by its organization into N groups (participants) each one spatially confined in a set. The overall optimal control problem consists in driving the ensemble of sets as close as possible to a given point (the “exit”) while the population in each set minimizes its control effort subject to its sweeping dynamics with a controlled state dependent velocity drift. In order to capture the conflict between the goal of the overall population and those of the various groups, the problem is cast as a bilevel optimization framework. A key challenge of this problem consists in bringing together two quite different paradigms: bilevel programming and sweeping dynamics with a controlled drift. Necessary conditions of optimality in the form of a Maximum Principle of Pontryagin in the Gamkrelidze framework are derived. These conditions are then used to solve a simple illustrative example with two participants, emphasizing the interaction between them.