Control Schemes to Reduce Risk of Extinction in the Lotka-Volterra Predator-Prey Model

Abstract

The Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model is widely used in many disciplines such as ecology and economics. The model consists of a pair of first-order nonlinear differential equations. In this paper, we first analyze the dynamics, equilibria and steady state oscillation contours of the differential equations and study in particular a well-known problem of a high risk that the prey and/or predator may end up with extinction. We then introduce exogenous control to reduce the risk of extinction. We propose two control schemes. The first scheme, referred as convergence guaranteed scheme, achieves very fine granular control of the prey and predator populations, in terms of the final state and convergence dynamics, at the cost of sophisticated implementation. The second scheme, referred as on-off scheme, is very easy to implement and drive the populations to steady state oscillation that is far from the risk of extinction. Finally we investigate the robustness of these two schemes against parameter mismatch and observe that the on-off scheme is much more robust. Hence, we conclude that while the convergence guaranteed scheme achieves theoretically optimal performance, the on-off scheme is more attractive for practical applications.