On the structure of solutions for general hyperbolic systems of balance laws

The paper describes the qualitative structure of BV entropy solutions of a strictly hyperbolic system of balance laws with characteristic fields either piecewise genuinely nonlinear or linearly degenerate. In particular, we provide an accurate description of the local and global wave-front structure of a BV solution generated by a fractional step scheme combined with a wave-front tracking algorithm. This extends the corresponding results by Binahcini and Yu for strictly hyperbolic systems of conservation laws.