Controllability of diffusive Lotka-Volterra strongly competitive systems under boundary constrained controls

Abstract

We investigate the controllability of the competition-diffusion Lotka-Volterra system. Our primary focus is on the one-dimensional setting with Dirichlet boundary controls, interpreted as ecological management policies regulating the density of species at the habitat boundaries and satisfying bilateral constraints. We show that the system can be steered from any initial state to a constant steady state representing the extinction of the less competitive species. In contrast, we prove that controllability toward a steady state where the more competitive species vanishes is generally not achievable when the inter-species competition rates are too unbalanced. This obstruction is due to the existence of barrier solutions, which we explicitly construct based on the spectral properties of the associated reaction-diffusion operators. Our theoretical results are illustrated through numerical simulations and are accompanied by a discussion of open problems and potential directions for future research.