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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.