Classical Driven Transport in Open Systems with Particle Interactions and General Couplings to Reservoirs

We study nonequilibrium steady states of lattice gases with nearest-neighbor interactions that are driven between two reservoirs. Density profiles in these systems exhibit oscillations close to the reservoirs. We demonstrate that an approach based on time-dependent density functional theory copes with these oscillations and predicts phase diagrams of bulk densities to a good approximation under arbitrary boundary-reservoir couplings. The minimum or maximum current principles can be applied only for specific bulk-adapted couplings. We show that they generally fail to give the correct topology of phase diagrams but can still be useful for getting insight into the mutual arrangement of different phases.