Optimal vaccination strategies for an seir model of infectious diseases with logistic growth

Abstract

In this paper an improved SEIR model for an infectious disease is presented which includes logistic growth for the total population. The aim is to develop optimal vaccination strategies against the spread of a generic disease. These vaccination strategies arise from the study of optimal control problems with various kinds of constraints including mixed control-state and state constraints. After presenting the new model and implementing the optimal control problems by means of a first-discretize-then-optimize method, numerical results for six scenarios are discussed and compared to an analytical optimal control law based on Pontrygin’s minimum principle that allows to verify these results as approximations of candidate optimal solutions.