Near‐optimal control of a stochastic pine wilt disease model with prevention strategies

Source abstract

Pine wood nematode disease has become nowadays a major threat to forest ecosystems and caused huge economic and environmental losses to many countries and regions. Considering the influence of environmental factors such as temperature, drought, and humidity, as well as possible prevention strategies, including trunk injection, cutting infected pines, and insecticide application, in this paper, we develop a stochastic pine wilt disease model with prevention strategies, aiming to obtain the conditions for its near‐optimal control. The near‐optimality problem is constructed by decreasing the infected pine forests and beetle population while minimizing the costs of prevention strategies. We first verify that, under certain convexity conditions, the near‐minimum condition of the Hamiltonian function is sufficient for the near‐optimal control. Then, by utilizing the spike variational technique, we derive the necessary conditions of the near‐optimal control. Finally, we present an example to illustrate the validity of the main theoretical results, which indicates that reasonable prevention strategies could effectively reduce pine wilt infection, and therefore, to some extent, could protect the pine forests from pine wilt disease and reduce economic losses caused by this disease.