A mass-conserved tumor invasion system with quasi-variational degenerate diffusion

Abstract

This paper deals with a nonlinear system (S) composed of three PDEs and one ODE below: [Formula: see text] The system (S) was proposed as one of the mathematical models which describe tumor invasion phenomena with chemotaxis effects. The most important and interesting point is that the diffusion coefficient of tumor cells, denoted by [Formula: see text], is influenced by both nonlocal effect of a chemical attractive substance, denoted by [Formula: see text], and the local one of extracellular matrix, denoted by [Formula: see text]. From this point, the first PDE in (S) contains a nonlinear cross diffusion. Actually, this mathematical setting gives an inner product of a suitable real Hilbert space, which governs the dynamics of the density of tumor cells [Formula: see text], a quasi-variational structure. Hence, the first purpose in this paper is to make it clear what this real Hilbert space is. After this, we show the existence of strong time local solutions to the initial-boundary problems associated with (S) when the space dimension is [Formula: see text] by applying the general theory of evolution inclusions on real Hilbert spaces with quasi-variational structures. Moreover, for the case [Formula: see text] we succeed in constructing a strong time global solution.