Flux-corrected transport stabilization of an evolutionary cross-diffusion cancer invasion model

Abstract: In the present work, we investigate a model of the invasion of healthy tissue by cancer cells which is described by a system of nonlinear PDEs consisting of a cross-diffusion-reaction equation and two additional nonlinear ordinary differential equations. We show that when the convective part of the system, the chemotactic term, is dominant, then straightforward numerical methods for the studied system may be unstable. We present an implicit finite element method using conforming $P_1$ or $Q_1$ finite elements to discretize the model in space and the $\theta$-method for discretization in time. The discrete problem is stabilized using a nonlinear flux-corrected transport approach. It is proved that both the nonlinear scheme and the linearized problems used in fixed-point iterations are solvable and positivity preserving. Several numerical experiments are presented in 2D using the deal.II library to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method.