On a minimum eradication time for the SIR model with time-dependent coefficients

We study the minimum eradication time problem for controlled Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) epidemic models that incorporate vaccination control and time-varying infected and recovery rates. Unlike the SIR model with constant rates, the time-varying model is more delicate as the number of infectious individuals can oscillate, which causes ambiguity for the definition of the eradication time. We accordingly introduce two definitions that describe the minimum eradication time, and we prove that for a suitable choice of the threshold, the two definitions coincide. We also study the well-posedness of time-dependent Hamilton–Jacobi equation that the minimum eradication time satisfies in the viscosity sense and verify that the value function is locally semiconcave under certain conditions.