The regional control of a fractional spatio-temporal SIR model

Abstract

This paper investigates a regional optimal control problem for a nonlinear spatio-temporal epidemiological model involving fractional diffusion on a bounded domain. In this work, we consider a general form of disease transmission, and two types of control, vaccination and treatment. We establish the existence and uniqueness of global-in-time solutions to our proposed system. We also prove the existence of an optimal control that minimizes the infected individuals as well as the cost of vaccination and treatment. The necessary conditions for optimality are derived. We show that concentrating vaccination in a selected region of the domain can substantially mitigate the spread of the disease. Numerical simulations are given.