An N-barrier maximum principle for elliptic systems arising from the study of traveling waves in reaction-diffusion systems

By employing the N-barrier method developed in the paper, we establish a new N-barrier maximum principle for diffusive Lotka-Volterra systems of two competing species. As an application of this maximum principle, we show under certain conditions, the existence and nonexistence of traveling waves solutions for systems of three competing species. In addition, new $(1,0,0)$-$(u^{\ast},v^{\ast},0)$ waves are given in terms of the tanh function provided that the parameters satisfy certain conditions.