The method of quasidecoupling for discontinuous solutions to conservation laws (Q1203988)

We are concerned with the existence, uniqueness, and qualitative behavior of discontinuous solutions to nonlinear conservation laws. The main objective of this paper is to describe an analytical method -- the quasidecoupling method -- and to study its applications to these problems for discontinuous solutions to hyperbolic systems of conservation laws with linearly degenerate characteristic fields. The novel feature of the method described here is the quasidecoupling of the entropy conservative inequalities and, to a lesser extent, the particular forms of entropy conservative inequalities for conservation laws.