On Population Dynamics with Campaign on Contraception as Control Strategy

Abstract

This work considers a population divided into two groups according to the adoption of contraception. The campaign in favour of contraception is modelled as a bounded optimal control problem within the framework of the logistic and the Malthusian models of population dynamics. The control is the fraction of non-adopters successfully educated on contraception. The objective is to maximise the number of non-adopters successfully educated on contraception over time. The optimisation problem is solved using the Pontryagin's maximum principle and the parameters of the model are estimated using the method of least squares.