Regularizing effects of the entropy functional in optimal transport and planning problems

We analyze optimal transport problems with additional entropic cost evaluated along curves in the Wasserstein space which join two probability measures m0, m1. The effect of the additional entropy functional results into an elliptic regularization for the (so-called) Kantorovich potentials of the dual problem. Assuming the initial and terminal measures to be positive and smooth, we prove that the optimal curve remains smooth for all time. We focus on the case that the transport problem is set on a convex bounded domain in the d-dimensional Euclidean space (with no-flux condition on the boundary), but we also mention the case of Gaussian -like measures in the whole space. The approach follows ideas introduced by P.-L. Lions in the theory of mean-field games [27]. The result provides with a smooth approximation of minimizers in optimization problems with penalizing congestion terms, which appear in mean-field control or mean-field planning problems. This allows us to exploit new estimates for this kind of problems by using displacement convexity properties in the Eulerian approach.