A Discrete Mathematical Modeling and Optimal Control of the Electoral Behavior with regard to a Political Party

Abstract

In this work, we propose a discrete mathematical model that describes the dynamics of citizens who have the right to vote and their electoral behavior with regard to a political party during an awareness program or an electoral campaign. Also, we propose an optimal strategy for an awareness program or an election campaign that helps politicians to distinguish between different categories of voters in order to increase the participation rate in the electoral process and obtain the greatest possible number of votes with a minimal effort. Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle, in discrete time, is used to characterize the optimal controls and the optimality system is solved by an iterative method. The numerical simulation is carried out using Matlab. Consequently, the obtained results confirm the performance of the optimization strategy.