Optimal control strategies for the sterile mosquitoes technique

TL;DR

This paper develops and analyzes optimal control strategies for the sterile insect technique to effectively reduce mosquito populations and disease transmission, using simplified dynamic models and numerical optimization.

Contribution

It introduces a method to determine optimal release strategies for sterile mosquitoes based on simplified population dynamics models.

Findings

Optimal strategies significantly improve mosquito population suppression.

Numerical simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed control protocols.

The approach simplifies the optimization process for real-world implementation.

Abstract

Mosquitoes are responsible for the transmission of many diseases such as dengue fever, zika or chigungunya. One way to control the spread of these diseases is to use the sterile insect technique (SIT), which consists in a massive release of sterilized male mosquitoes. This strategy aims at reducing the total population over time, and has the advantage being specific to the targeted species, unlike the use of pesticides.In this article, we study the optimal release strategies in order to maximize the efficiency of this technique.We consider simplified models that describe the dynamics of eggs, males, females and sterile males in order to optimize the release protocol. We determine in a precise way optimal strategies, which allows us to tackle numerically the underlying optimization problem in a very simple way. We also present some numerical simulations to illustrate our results.