Role of vaccination, the release of competitor snails, chlorination of water, and treatment controls on the transmission of bovine schistosomiasis disease: a mathematical study

Abstract

Abstract In this study, we derive an optimal control problem for schistosomiasis disease by using Caputo fractional derivative. In the formulation of the proposed control problem, we use the concept of Pontryagin’s minimum principle and the Hamiltonian. To minimize the infected bovine population, we use vaccination, the release of competitor snails, chlorination of water, and treatment controls. The forward-backward sweep method is used to derive the numerical solution of the proposed problem. The parameter values based on real data are used to plot a number of figures. The objective of this paper is to explore the possibilities of controlling the spread of schistosomiasis disease. The presence of the Caputo fractional operator includes the memory in the model which is the main motivation behind the proposed fractional-order generalization.