Copyright © 2012 Hassan Zarei et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The present study proposes a fuzzy mathematical model of HIV infection consisting of a linear fuzzy differential equations (FDEs) system describing the ambiguous immune cells level and the viral load which are due to the intrinsic fuzziness of the immune system's strength in HIV-infected patients. The immune cells in question are considered CD4+ T-cells and cytotoxic T-lymphocytes (CTLs). The dynamic behavior of the immune cells level and the viral load within the three groups of patients with weak, moderate, and strong immune systems are analyzed and compared. Moreover, the approximate explicit solutions of the proposed model are derived using a fitting-based method. In particular, a fuzzy control function indicating the drug dosage is incorporated into the proposed model and a fuzzy optimal control problem (FOCP) minimizing both the viral load and the drug costs is constructed. An optimality condition is achieved as a fuzzy boundary value problem (FBVP). In addition, the optimal fuzzy control function is completely characterized and a numerical solution for the optimality system is computed.