Stability and Optimal Control of a Delayed HIV Model

Abstract

We propose and investigate a delayed model that studies the relationship between HIV and the immune system during the natural course of infection and in the context of antiviral treatment regimes. Sufficient criteria for local asymptotic stability of the infected and viral free equilibria are given. An optimal control problem with time delays both in state variables (incubation delay) and control (pharmacological delay) is then formulated and analyzed, where the objective consists to find the optimal treatment strategy that maximizes the number of uninfected $CD4^{+}$ T cells as well as CTL immune response cells, keeping the drug therapy as low as possible.