| Abstract: | Sterile insect technique (SIT) provides an attractive alternative to chemical pesticides for insect pest eradication. Because mass rearing facilities are expensive both to construct and to maintain, project managers have a limited number of sterile insects to use in any single eradication campaign. The problem of availability of sufficient numbers of sterile insects can be magnified when two or more independent pest infestations occur at the same time. In this paper we present the results of a modeling study in which dynamic programming is used to compute the optimal allocation strategy for release of sterile insects to control two independent infestations of Mediterranean fruit fly, Ceratitis capitata (Wied.) (medfly). We assume that a fixed number of sterile flies are available per week. Both deterministic and stochastic analyses are presented. |
