Optimal Control of a Malaria Model with Long-Lasting Insecticide-Treated Nets

TL;DR

This paper develops an optimal control framework for a malaria transmission model incorporating long-lasting insecticide-treated nets, providing insights for effective malaria prevention strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optimal control approach for malaria models with bednets, deriving conditions for optimal usage to inform public health policies.

Findings

Derived the basic reproduction number for the model

Established stability conditions for disease-free and endemic equilibria

Identified near-optimal bednet usage strategies

Abstract

A deterministic multi-stage malaria model with a non-therapeutic control measure, the use of mosquito bednet is formulated and analyzed. The model basic reproduction number is derived, and analytical results show that the models equilibria are locally and globally asymptotically stable when certain threshold conditions are satisfied. Pontryagin's Maximum Principle with respect to a time dependent constant is used to derive the necessary conditions for the optimal usage of the Long-Lasting Insecticide-treated bednets(LLINs) to mitigate the malaria transmission dynamics. This is accomplished by introducing biologically admissible control and e-approximate sub-optimal control. The results from this study could help public health planners and policy decision-makers to design reachable and more practical malaria prevention programs "close" to the optimal strategy.