Impulsive fishery resource transporting strategies based on an open‐ended stochastic growth model having a latent variable

Abstract

In inland fisheries, transporting fishery resource individuals from a habitat to spatially apart habitat(s) has recently been considered for fisheries stock management in the natural environment. However, its mathematical optimization, especially finding when and how much of the population should be transported, is still a fundamental unresolved issue. We propose a new impulse control framework to tackle this issue based on a simple but new stochastic growth model of individual fishes. The novel growth model governing individuals' body weights uses a Wright–Fisher model as a latent driver to reproduce plausible growth dynamics. The optimization problem is formulated as an impulse control problem of a cost–benefit functional constrained by a degenerate parabolic Fokker–Planck equation of the stochastic growth dynamics. Because the growth dynamics have an observable variable and an unobservable variable (a variable difficult or impossible to observe), we consider both full‐information and partial‐information cases. The latter is more involved but more realistic because of not explicitly using the unobservable variable in designing the controls. In both cases, resolving an optimization problem reduces to solving the associated Fokker–Planck and its adjoint equations, the latter being nontrivial. We present a derivation procedure of the adjoint equation and its internal boundary conditions in time to efficiently derive the optimal transporting strategy. We finally provide a demonstrative computational example of a transporting problem of Ayu sweetfish Plecoglossus altivelis altivelis based on the latest real data set.