The Filippov characteristic flow for the aggregation equation with mildly singular potentials

Existence and uniqueness of global in time measure solution for the multidimensional aggregation equation is analyzed. Such a system can be written as a continuity equation with a velocity field computed through a self-consistent interaction potential. In Carrillo et al. (2011) [17], a well-posedness theory based on the geometric approach of gradient flows in measure metric spaces has been developed for mildly singular potentials at the origin under the basic assumption of being λ-convex. We propose here an alternative method using classical tools from PDEs. We show the existence of a characteristic flow based on Filippov's theory of discontinuous dynamical systems such that the weak measure solution is the pushforward measure with this flow. Uniqueness is obtained thanks to a contraction argument in transport distances using the λ  -convexity of the potential. Moreover, we show the equivalence of this solution with the gradient flow solution. Finally, we show the convergence of a numerical scheme for general measure solutions in this framework allowing for the simulation of solutions for initial smooth densities after their first blow-up time in LpLp-norms.