Biological control of caterpillar sugarcane (Diatraea saccharalis) considering interval mathematical models

Abstract

Biological control is a sustainable agricultural practice that was introduced to improve crop yields and has been highlighted among the various pest control techniques. However, real mathematical models that describe biological control models can have errors measurements or even are built with lack of information. In these cases, intervals may be feasible to show the lack of information or even measurement errors. So we consider interval mathematical models to represent the biological control problem. Specifically, in the present paper we illustrated the solution of discrete time interval optimal control problem for a practical application of biological control. To solve the problem, we used the single level constrained interval arithmetic [8] and the dynamic programming technique [2], along with the idea proposed in [22] for the solution of interval problem.

Keywords

• Interval optimal control problem
• interval mathematical models
• single level constrained interval arithmetic
• dynamic programming
• biological control.