Diffusing wild type and sterile mosquitoes in an optimal control setting

Abstract

This paper develops an optimal control framework to investigate the introduction of sterile type mosquitoes to reduce the overal moquito population. As is well known, mosquitoes are vectors of disease. For instance the WHO lists, among other diseases, Malaria, Dengue Fever, Rift Valley Fever, Yellow Fever, Chikungunya Fever and Zika. [http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs387/en/ ] The goal is to establish the existence of a solution given an optimal sterilization protocol as well as to develop the corresponding optimal control representation to minimize the infiltrating mosquito population while minimizing fecundity and the number of sterile type mosquitoes introduced into the environment per unit time. This paper incorporates the diffusion of the mosquitoes into the controlled model and presents a number of numerical simulations.

Keywords: Optimal control; Partial differential equations; Sterile mosquitoes.