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This article is concerned with the problem of controlling a simple immigration-birth-death process, which represents a pest population, by the introduction of a predator in the habitat of the pests. The optimization criterion is the minimization of the expected long-run average cost per unit time. It is possible to construct an appropriate semi-Markov decision model with a finite set of states if and only if the difference between the per capita birth rate and the per capita death rate of the pests is smaller than half of the rate at which the predator is introduced in the habitat. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]