Hyperbolic systems of conservation laws (Q1300571)

This is an excellent survey article on the wave-front tracking approach to systems of hyperbolic conservation laws in one space dimension. This method has been developed by Bressan and his coworkers and provides a proof of the fundamental existence theorem for initial data with small variation which is different from Glimm's random choice method. The wave-front tracking method uses approximate solutions which are piecewise constant. This requires in particular to replace rarefaction waves by a sequence of small jumps. Some careful estimates on the number and strength of wave interactions are needed to establish the existence of a global approximate solution. Ideas of Liu and Yang are used to show convergence of the approximate solutions. The advantage of this approach is that it not only proves the existence of weak entropy solutions but shows that the solutions constructed by wave-front tracking form a Lipschitz-continuous semigroup. The paper is written in a very clear style and can be recommended to anybody who wants to learn about the semigroup approach. It contains a short review of the basic concepts involved before going into details.