Optimal Control Analysis on the Transmission Dynamics of Hepatitis C Virus Infection with Asymptomatic Carriers

In this paper, the authors develop the transmission dynamics of the acute and chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) epidemic problem and incorporate optimal control strategy for controlling the spread of the disease. In order to control the spread of the virus, we develop a control strategy by applying three control variables such as protection, treatment of acute infection and treatment of chronic infection to minimize the number of acute infected, chronically infected with HCV individuals and maximize the number of susceptible and recovered individuals. We find the necessary conditions for the optimal solution for controlling the spread of the virus using Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle (PMP). RungeKutta of order four was used for the numerical simulation to demonstrate the achievability of the control strategies. (