Longest minimal length partitions

International audienceThis article provides numerical evidence that under volume constraint the ball is the set which maximizes the perimeter of the least-perimeter partition into cells with prescribed areas. We introduce a numerical maximization algorithm which performs multiple optimizations steps at each iteration to approximate minimal partitions. Using these partitions we compute perturbations of the domain which increase the minimal perimeter. The initialization of the optimal partitioning algorithm uses capacity-constrained Voronoi diagrams. A new algorithm is proposed to identify such diagrams, by computing the gradients of areas and perimeters for the Voronoi cells with respect to the Voronoi points