Numerical Methods for Mean Field Games and Mean Field Type Control

Abstract: Mean Field Games (MFG) have been introduced to tackle games with a large number of competing players. Considering the limit when the number of players is infinite, Nash equilibria are studied by considering the interaction of a typical player with the population's distribution. The situation in which the players cooperate corresponds to Mean Field Control (MFC) problems, which can also be viewed as optimal control problems driven by a McKean-Vlasov dynamics. These two types of problems have found a wide range of potential applications, for which numerical methods play a key role since most models do not have analytical solutions. In these notes, we review several aspects of numerical methods for MFG and MFC. We start by presenting some heuristics in a basic linear-quadratic setting. We then discuss numerical schemes for forward-backward systems of partial differential equations (PDEs), optimization techniques for variational problems driven by a Kolmogorov-Fokker-Planck PDE, an approach based on a monotone operator viewpoint, and stochastic methods relying on machine learning tools.