Viscous profiles in models of collective movement with negative diffusivity

In this paper, we consider an advection–diffusion equation, in one space dimension, whose diffusivity can be negative. Such equations arise in particular in the modeling of vehicular traffic flows or crowds dynamics, where a negative diffusivity simulates aggregation phenomena. We focus on traveling-wave solutions that connect two states whose diffusivity has different signs; under some geometric conditions, we prove the existence, uniqueness (in a suitable class of solutions avoiding plateaus) and sharpness of the corresponding profiles. Such results are then extended to the case of end states where the diffusivity is positive, but it becomes negative in some interval between them. Also the vanishing viscosity limit is considered. At last, we provide and discuss several examples of diffusivities that change sign and show that our conditions are satisfied for a large class of them in correspondence of real data.