Spread of Chronic Wasting Disease under Stochastic Environmental Conditions and its Control using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a fatal prion disease affecting deer, elk, moose, reindeer, muntjac, and other cervids. Because free-ranging cervid populations face environmental variability and randomness, deterministic models may miss important dynamics like stochastic fade-out. We develop a stochastic Susceptible-Infectious-Environmental model using differential equations with reflection to ensure the susceptible class remains non-negative. We examine how environmental variability influences cervid populations as CWD pressure and control measures increase. For the deterministic model, we derive the basic reproduction number as the sum of direct and environmental contributions, showing the endemic phase arises at R0=1. For the stochastic system, we establish local well-posedness, positivity, and the disease-free law. The top Lyapunov exponent for invasion remains unaffected by reflection. We evaluate CWD mitigation using a deep reinforcement learning agent trained with Proximal Policy Optimization in a hybrid action space, comparing hunting, decontamination, and combined strategies. In the deterministic case, hunting alone can control the disease but reduces the population by about 58%, while decontamination requires sustained effort. The combined policy more than doubles the cervid population and nearly eliminates infection and contamination. In the stochastic case, the policy contains the disease in about 80% of runs, with 10% experiencing large outbreaks; effectiveness decreases as noise increases. Across all scenarios, the agent consistently emphasizes environmental decontamination, the key control method.