Global asymptotic stability of bistable traveling fronts in reaction-diffusion systems and their applications to biological models

This paper deals with the global asymptotic stability and uniqueness (up to translation) of bistable traveling fronts in a class of reaction-diffusion systems. The known results do not apply in solving these problems because the reaction terms do not satisfy the required monotone condition. To overcome the difficulty, a weak monotone condition is proposed for the reaction terms, which is called interval monotone condition. Under such a weak monotone condition, the existence and comparison theorem of solutions is first established for reaction-diffusion systems on R by appealing to the theory of abstract differential equations. The global asymptotic stability and uniqueness (up to translation) of bistable traveling fronts are then proved by the elementary superand sub-solution comparison and squeezing methods for nonlinear evolution equations. Finally, these abstract results are applied to a two species competition-diffusion model and a system modeling man–environment–man epidemics. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.