Carleman discretization of impulsive systems: application to the optimal control problem of anti-angiogenic tumor therapies

Impulsive systems model continuous-time frameworks with control actions occurring at discrete time instants. Among the others, such models assume relevance in medical situations, where the physical system under control evolves continuously in time, whilst the control therapy is instantaneously administered, e.g. by means of intra-venous injections. This note proposes a discretization algorithm for an impulsive system, whose methods relies on the Carleman embedding techinique. The discretization times are given by the impulsive control action and do not require to have a fixed discretization period. On the ground of the resulting discrete-time system (which can be computed with arbitrary level of accuracy) we propose an optimal control algorithm on a finite horizon. Simulations are carried out on a model exploited for anti-angiogenic tumor therapies and show the effectiveness of the theoretical results.