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In many social groups, for example, in technical committees for standardization, at the international, regional and national levels, in European communities, managers of ecovillages, social movements (occupy), international organizations, decision-making is based on the consensus of the group members. Instead of voting, where the majority wins over the minority, consensus allows for a solution that each member of the group supports, or at least considers acceptable. This approach ensures that all group members’ opinions, ideas and needs are taken into account. At the same time, it is noted that reaching consensus takes a long time, since it is necessary to ensure agreement within the group, regardless of its size. It was shown that in some situations the number of iterations (agreements, negotiations) is very significant. Moreover, in the decision-making process, there is always a risk of blocking the decision by the minority in the group, which not only delays the decisionmaking time, but makes it impossible. Typically, such a minority is one or two odious people in the group. At the same time, such a member of the group tries to dominate in the discussion, always remaining in his opinion, ignoring the position of other colleagues. This leads to a delay in the decision-making process, on the one hand, and a deterioration in the quality of consensus, on the other, since only the opinion of the dominant member of the group has to be taken into account. To overcome the crisis in this situation, it was proposed to make a decision on the principle of «consensus minus one» or «consensus minus two», that is, do not take into account the opinion of one or two odious members of the group.

The article, based on modeling consensus using the model of regular Markov chains, examines the question of how much the decision-making time according to the «consensus minus one» rule is reduced, when the position of the dominant member of the group is not taken into account.

The general conclusion that follows from the simulation results is that the rule of thumb for making decisions on the principle of «consensus minus one» has a corresponding mathematical justification. The simulation results showed that the application of the «consensus minus one» rule can reduce the time to reach consensus in the group by 76–95%, which is important for practice.

The average number of agreements hyperbolically depends on the average authoritarianism of the group members (excluding the authoritarian one), which means the possibility of delaying the agreement process at high values of the authoritarianism of the group members.

Modeling the fight against terrorist, pirate and robbery acts at sea is an urgent scientific task due to the prevalence of force acts and the insufficient number of works on this issue. The actions of pirates and terrorists are diverse. Using a base ship, they can attack ships up to 450–500 miles from the coast. Having chosen the target, they pursue it and use the weapons to board the ship. Actions to free a ship captured by pirates or terrorists include: blocking the ship, predicting where pirates might be on the ship, penetrating (from board to board, by air or from under water) and cleaning up the ship’s premises. An analysis of the special literature on the actions of pirates and terrorists showed that the act of force (and actions to neutralize it) consists of two stages: firstly, blocking the vessel, which consists in forcing it to stop, and secondly, neutralizing the team (terrorist groups, pirates), including penetration of a ship (ship) and its cleaning. The stages of the cycle are matched by indicators — the probability of blocking and the probability of neutralization. The variables of the act of force model are the number of ships (ships, boats) of the attackers and defenders, as well as the strength of the capture group of the attackers and the crew of the ship - the victim of the attack. Model parameters (indicators of naval and combat superiority) were estimated using the maximum likelihood method using an international database of incidents at sea. The values of these parameters are 7.6–8.5. Such high values of superiority parameters reflect the parties' ability to act in force acts. An analytical method for calculating excellence parameters is proposed and statistically substantiated. The following indicators are taken into account in the model: the ability of the parties to detect the enemy, the speed and maneuverability characteristics of the vessels, the height of the vessel and the characteristics of the boarding equipment, the characteristics of weapons and protective equipment, etc. Using the Becker model and the theory of discrete choice, the probability of failure of the force act is estimated. The significance of the obtained models for combating acts of force in the sea space lies in the possibility of quantitative substantiation of measures to protect the ship from pirate and terrorist attacks and deterrence measures aimed at preventing attacks (the presence of armed guards on board the ship, assistance from warships and helicopters).

The study of the mechanism for the development of mass panic in view of its extreme importance and social danger is an important scientific task. Available information about the mechanism of her development is based mainly on the work of psychologists and belongs to the category of inaccurate. Therefore, the theory of fuzzy sets has been chosen as a tool for developing a mathematical model of a person's susceptibility to panic situations. As a result of the study, an fuzzy model was developed, consisting of blocks: “Fuzzyfication”, where the degree of belonging of the values of the input parameters to fuzzy sets is calculated; “Inference” where, based on the degree of belonging of the input parameters, the resulting function of belonging of the output value to an odd model is calculated; “Defuzzyfication”, where using the center of gravity method, the only quantitative value of the output variable characterizing a person's susceptibility to panic situations is determined Since the real quantitative values for linguistic variables mental properties of a person are unknown, then to assess the quality of the developed model, without endangering people, it is not possible. Therefore, the quality of the results of fuzzy modeling was estimated by the calculated value of the determination coefficient R2, which showed that the developed fuzzy model belongs to the category of good quality models $(R^2 = 0.93)$, which confirms the legitimacy of the assumptions made during her development. In accordance with to the results of the simulation, human susceptibility to panic situations for sanguinics and cholerics can be attributed to “increased” (0.88), and for phlegmatics and melancholics — to “moderate” (0.38). This means that cholerics and sanguinics can become epicenters of panic and the initiators of stampede, and phlegmatics and melancholics — obstacles to evacuation routes. What should be taken into account when developing effective evacuation measures, the main task of which is to quickly and safely evacuate people from adverse conditions. In the approved methods, the calculation of normative values of safety parameters is based on simplified analytical models of human flow movement, because a large number of factors have to be taken into account, some of which are quantitatively uncertain. The obtained result in the form of quantitative estimates of a person's susceptibility to panic situations will increase the accuracy of calculations.

A mass congestion of people always represents a potential danger and threat for their lives. In addition, every year in the world a very large number of people die because of the crush, the main cause of which is mass panic. Therefore, the study of the phenomenon of mass panic in view of her extreme social danger is an important scientific task. Available information, about the processes of her occurrence and spread refers to the category inaccurate. Therefore, the theory of fuzzy sets has been chosen as a tool for developing a mathematical model of the mechanism of transmitting panic state among people with various temperament species.

When developing an fuzzy model, it was assumed that panic, from the epicenter of the shocking stimulus, spreads among people according to the wave principle, passing at different frequencies through different environments (types of human temperament), and is determined by the speed and intensity of the circular reaction of the mechanism of transmitting panic state among people. Therefore, the developed fuzzy model, along with two inputs, has two outputs — the speed and intensity of the circular reaction. In the block «Fuzzyfication», the degrees of membership of the numerical values of the input parameters to fuzzy sets are calculated. The «Inference» block at the input receives degrees of belonging for each input parameter and at the output determines the resulting function of belonging the speed of the circular reaction and her derivative, which is a function of belonging for the intensity of the circular reaction. In the «Defuzzyfication» block, using the center of gravity method, a quantitative value is determined for each output parameter. The quality assessment of the developed fuzzy model, carried out by calculating of the determination coefficient, showed that the developed mathematical model belongs to the category of good quality models.

The result obtained in the form of quantitative assessments of the circular reaction makes it possible to improve the quality of understanding of the mental processes occurring during the transmission of the panic state among people. In addition, this makes it possible to improve existing and develop new models of chaotic humans behaviors. Which are designed to develop effective solutions in crisis situations, aimed at full or partial prevention of the spread of mass panic, leading to the emergence of panic flight and the appearance of human casualties.

Data hiding in digital images is a promising direction of cybersecurity. Digital steganography methods provide imperceptible transmission of secret data over an open communication channel. The information embedding efficiency depends on the embedding imperceptibility, capacity, and robustness. These quality criteria are mutually inverse, and the improvement of one indicator usually leads to the deterioration of the others. A balance between them can be achieved using metaheuristic optimization. Metaheuristics are a class of optimization algorithms that find an optimal, or close to an optimal solution for a variety of problems, including those that are difficult to formalize, by simulating various natural processes, for example, the evolution of species or the behavior of animals. In this study, we propose an approach to data hiding in the hybrid spatial-frequency domain of digital images based on metaheuristic optimization. Changing a block of image pixels according to some change matrix is considered as an embedding operation. We select the change matrix adaptively for each block using metaheuristic optimization algorithms. In this study, we compare the performance of three metaheuristics such as genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization, and differential evolution to find the best change matrix. Experimental results showed that the proposed approach provides high imperceptibility of embedding, high capacity, and error-free extraction of embedded information. At the same time, storage of change matrices for each block is not required for further data extraction. This improves user experience and reduces the chance of an attacker discovering the steganographic attachment. Metaheuristics provided an increase in imperceptibility indicator, estimated by the PSNR metric, and the capacity of the previous algorithm for embedding information into the coefficients of the discrete cosine transform using the QIM method [Evsutin, Melman, Meshcheryakov, 2021] by 26.02% and 30.18%, respectively, for the genetic algorithm, 26.01% and 19.39% for particle swarm optimization, 27.30% and 28.73% for differential evolution.

The article examines the impact of non-market actions of participants in oligopolistic markets on the market structure. The following actions of one of the market participants aimed at increasing its market share are analyzed: 1) price manipulation; 2) blocking investments of stronger oligopolists; 3) destruction of produced products and capacities of competitors. Linear dynamic games with a quadratic criterion are used to model the strategies of oligopolists. The expediency of their use is due to the possibility of both an adequate description of the evolution of markets and the implementation of two mutually complementary approaches to determining the strategies of oligopolists: 1) based on the representation of models in the state space and the solution of generalized Riccati equations; 2) based on the application of operational calculus methods (in the frequency domain) which owns the visibility necessary for economic analysis.

The article shows the equivalence of approaches to solving the problem with maximin criteria of oligopolists in the state space and in the frequency domain. The results of calculations are considered in relation to a duopoly, with indicators close to one of the duopolies in the microelectronic industry of the world. The second duopolist is less effective from the standpoint of costs, though more mobile. Its goal is to increase its market share by implementing the non-market methods listed above.

Calculations carried out with help of the game model, made it possible to construct dependencies that characterize the relationship between the relative increase in production volumes over a 25-year period of weak and strong duopolists under price manipulation. Constructed dependencies show that an increase in the price for the accepted linear demand function leads to a very small increase in the production of a strong duopolist, but, simultaneously, to a significant increase in this indicator for a weak one.

Calculations carried out with use of the other variants of the model, show that blocking investments, as well as destroying the products of a strong duopolist, leads to more significant increase in the production of marketable products for a weak duopolist than to a decrease in this indicator for a strong one.

The decomposition algorithms provide approaches to deal with NP-hardness in solving discrete optimization problems (DOPs). In this article one of the promising ways to exploit sparse matrices — local elimination algorithm in parallel interpretation (LEAP) are demonstrated. That is a graph-based structural decomposition algorithm, which allows to compute a solution in stages such that each of them uses results from previous stages. At the same time LEAP heavily depends on elimination ordering which actually provides solving stages. Also paper considers tree- and block-parallel for LEAP and required realization process of it comparison of a several heuristics for obtaining a better elimination order and shows how is related graph structure, elimination ordering and solving time.