Stability of conservation laws with discontinuous coefficients (Q1305482)

In this paper the authors study an interesting generalization of ``classical'' hyperbolic conservation laws taking the flux function that may depend discontinuously on the space variable. This is a model problem that arises in many important applications, such as traffic flow problem or two-phase flow in porous media. Assuming some boundedness properties on the flux derivatives up to the second order and some other conditions on the data, they show \(L^1\) contractivity of weak solutions. Furthermore, they prove that the \(L^1\) difference between solutions to conservation laws with different flux functions is bounded by the total variation with respect to the space variable of the difference between the flux functions.