Analysis of Optimal Control Strategies for Preventing Computer Virus Infection and Reduce Program Files Damage with Other Symptoms

Abstract

Program files damage and other computer virus symptoms has become a very threatening issue to computer performance. This paper considered an model with incidence of infected and program files damaged computers and saturated incidence of vaccination and treatment function. Two control functions have been used; one for vaccinating the susceptible computer population and the other for the treatment of the program files damaged computer population. The Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle has been used to characterize the optimal control whose numerical results show the positive impact of the two controls used for controlling the infection dynamics of computer virus. Actually the intention of this study is to minimize the number of infected and program files damaged computer systems and at the same time minimize the cost associated to the controls. Efficiency analysis is also studied to determine the best control strategy among vaccination and treatment. Numerical simulations were carried out in this model to demonstrate the analytical results and it was revealed that combination of vaccination and treatment is the most successful way to minimize the incidence of program files damage.