High-Resolution Positivity and Asymptotic Preserving Numerical Methods for Chemotaxis and Related Models

Abstract

Many microorganisms exhibit a special pattern formation at the presence of a chemoattractant, food, light, or areas with high oxygen concentration. Collective cell movement can be described by a system of nonlinear PDEs on both macroscopic and microscopic levels. The classical PDE chemotaxis model is the Patlak-Keller-Segel system, which consists of a convection-diffusion equation for the cell density and a reaction-diffusion equation for the chemoattractant concentration. At the cellular (microscopic) level, a multiscale chemotaxis models can be used. These models are based on a combination of the macroscopic evolution equation for chemoattractant and microscopic models for cell evolution. The latter is governed by a Boltzmann-type kinetic equation with a local turning kernel operator that describes the velocity change of the cells. A common property of the chemotaxis systems is their ability to model a concentration phenomenon that mathematically results in solutions rapidly growing in small neighborhoods of concentration points/curves. The solutions may blow up or may exhibit a very singular, spiky behavior. In either case, capturing such singular solutions numerically is a challenging problem and the use of higher-order methods and/or adaptive strategies is often necessary. In addition, positivity preserving is an absolutely crucial property a good numerical method used to simulate chemotaxis should satisfy: this is the only way to guarantee a nonlinear stability of the method. For kinetic chemotaxis systems, it is also essential that numerical methods provide a consistent and stable discretization in certain asymptotic regimes. In this paper, we review some of the recent advances in developing of high-resolution finite-volume and finite-difference numerical methods that possess the aforementioned properties of the chemotaxis-type systems.