Near‐optimal control of a stochastic model for mountain pine beetles with pesticide application

Abstract

AbstractIn this paper, considering the effect of environmental factors such as climate change, temperature and drought on the growth of forests and beetles as well as the pine forests death and economic loss caused by outbreaks of mountain pine beetles, we first develop a stochastic mountain pine beetle model with pesticide application, and then consider its near‐optimal control (NOC) problem. The problem NOC is formulated by decreasing the mountain pine beetles while keeping the cost of pesticide application to a minimum. By Pontryagin stochastic maximum principle, we establish some sufficient and necessary conditions of the near‐optimality. Some numerical simulations are carried out to illustrate the theoretical results, which indicate that the pesticide application could effectively control the number of beetles and relieve the pressure from the attacking of beetles on the pines. To some extent, this control strategy could protect the pine forests and reduce economic losses caused by the mountain pine beetles.