On the Controllability of the Lotka McKendrick Model of Population Dynamics

In this work we consider the problem of exact controllability of the linear Lotka McKendrick model of population dynamics. We establish an observability inequality and show that any initial condition can be steered into any quasi steady state by a distributed control, except for a small interval of ages near zero. In contrast with that we observe that the boundary control is more efficient in the sense that it controls the entire population. The biological implication of our conclusions is that a closed population is more efficiently controlled through birth control as opposed to migration and eradication. In particular, this supports the ‘‘trap-alter-release’’ method for controlling a population of stray cats as opposed to the ‘‘trap and kill’’ method