Analysis of the Rolling Carpet Strategy to Eradicate an Invasive Species.

In order to prevent the propagation of human diseases transmitted by mosquitoes (such as dengue or zika), one possible solution is to act directly on the mosquito population. In this work, we consider an invasive species (the mosquitoes) and we study two strategies to eradicate the population in the whole space by a local intervention. The dynamics of the population is modeled through a bistable reaction diffusion equation in an one dimensional setting and both strategies are based on the same idea : we act on a moving interval. The action of the first strategy is to kill as many individuals as we can in this moving interval. The action of the second strategy is to release sterile males in this moving interval. For both strategies, we manage to generate traveling waves that propagate in the opposite direction relative to the one of the natural invasive traveling wave. These cases correspond to succeeding in eradicating the invasive species. Furthermore, for the first strategy, we fully characterize the minimal size of the interval. All the results are illustrated by numerical simulations.