Optimal Control in Age-Structured Populations: A Comparison of Rate-Control and Effort-Control

TL;DR

This paper compares rate-control and effort-control harvesting strategies in age-structured populations, deriving optimality conditions and highlighting fundamental mathematical and bioeconomic differences.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous mathematical analysis of two harvesting mechanisms, revealing structural differences and deriving explicit optimality conditions for each.

Findings

Rate-control yields additive harvesting with explicit optimality conditions.

Effort-control introduces nonlocal coupling in the optimality system.

Structural differences significantly impact bioeconomic outcomes.

Abstract

This paper investigates the dynamics and optimal harvesting of age-structured populations governed by McKendrick--von Foerster equations, contrasting two distinct harvesting mechanisms: rate-control and effort-control. For the rate-control formulation, where harvesting acts as a direct additive removal term, we derive first-order necessary optimality conditions of Pontryagin type for the associated infinite-horizon optimal control problem, explicitly characterizing the adjoint system, transversality conditions, and control switching laws. In contrast, the effort-control formulation introduces harvesting as a multiplicative mortality intensity dependent on aggregate population size. We demonstrate that this aggregate dependence structurally alters the optimality system, formally generating a nonlocal coupling term in the adjoint equation that links all ages through the total stock. By combining rigorous variational control derivations, and explicit stationary profiles, this work clarifies the profound mathematical and bioeconomic distinctions between additive and multiplicative harvesting strategies.