Optimal control of a vector borne disease with horizontal transmission

The paper presents the optimal control applied to a vector borne disease with direct transmission in host population. First, we show the existence of the control problem and then use both analytical and numerical techniques to investigate that there are cost effective control efforts for prevention of direct and indirect transmission of disease. In order to do this three control functions are used, one for vector-reduction strategies and the other two for personal (human) protection and blood screening, respectively. We completely characterize the optimal control and compute the numerical solution of the optimality system using an iterative method. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.