On the Consistency of the Reaction-Telegraph Process Within Finite Domains

Reaction-telegraph equation (RTE) is a mathematical model that has often been used to describe natural phenomena, with specific applications ranging from physics to social sciences. In particular, in the context of ecology, it is believed to be a more realistic model to describe animal movement than the more traditional approach based on the reaction-diffusion equations. Indeed, the reaction-telegraph equation arises from more realistic microscopic assumptions about individual animal movement (the correlated random walk) and hence could be expected to be more relevant than the diffusion-type models that assume the simple, unbiased Brownian motion. However, the RTE has one significant drawback as its solutions are not positively defined. It is not clear at which stage of the RTE derivation the realism of the microscopic description is lost and/or whether the RTE can somehow be ‘improved’ to guarantee the solutions positivity. Here we show that the origin of the problem is twofold. Firstly, the RTE is not fully equivalent to the Cattaneo system from which it is obtained; the equivalence can only be achieved in a certain parameter range and only for the initial conditions containing a finite number of Fourier modes. Secondly, the Dirichlet type boundary conditions routinely used for reaction-diffusion equations appear to be meaningless if used for the RTE resulting in solutions with unrealistic properties. We conclude that, for the positivity to be regained, one has to use the Cattaneo system with boundary conditions of Robin type or Neumann type, and we show how relevant classes of solutions can be obtained. © 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.