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In this paper, we propose an adaptive algorithm that simulates the process of forming the initial behavioral skills on the example of the system ‘eye-arm’ animat. The situation is the formation of the initial behavioral skills occurs, for example, when a child masters the management of their hands by understanding the relationship between baseline unidentified spots on the retina of his eye and the position of the real object. Since the body control skills are not ‘hardcoded’ initially in the brain and the spinal cord at the level of instincts, the human child, like most young of other mammals, it is necessary to develop these skills in search behavior mode. Exploratory behavior begins with trial and error and then its contribution is gradually reduced as the development of the body and its environment. Since the correct behavior patterns at this stage of development of the organism does not exist for now, then the only way to select the right skills is a positive reinforcement to achieve the objective. A key feature of the proposed algorithm is to fix in the imprinting mode, only the final action that led to success, and that is very important, led to the familiar imprinted situation clearly leads to success. Over time, the continuous chain is lengthened right action — maximum use of previous positive experiences and negative ‘forgotten’ and not used.

Thus there is the gradual replacement of the random search purposeful actions that observed in the real young. Thus, the algorithm is able to establish a correspondence between the laws of the world and the ‘inner feelings’, the internal state of the animat. The proposed animat model was used 2 types of neural networks: 1) neural network NET1 to the input current which is fed to the position of the brush arms and the target point, and the output of motor commands, directing ‘brush’ manipulator animat to the target point; 2) neural network NET2 is received at the input of target coordinates and the current coordinates of the ‘brush’ and the output value is formed likelihood that the animat already ‘know’ this situation, and he ‘knows’ how to react to it. With this architecture at the animat has to rely on the ‘experience’ of neural networks to recognize situations where the response from NET2 network of close to 1, and on the other hand, run a random search, when the experience of functioning in this area of the visual field in animat not (response NET2 close to 0).

The paper presents a review of recent developments of hybrid discrete-continuous models in cell population dynamics. Such models are widely used in the biological modelling. Cells are considered as individual objects which can divide, die by apoptosis, differentiate and move under external forces. In the simplest representation cells are considered as soft spheres, and their motion is described by Newton’s second law for their centers. In a more complete representation, cell geometry and structure can be taken into account. Cell fate is determined by concentrations of intra-cellular substances and by various substances in the extracellular matrix, such as nutrients, hormones, growth factors. Intra-cellular regulatory networks are described by ordinary differential equations while extracellular species by partial differential equations. We illustrate the application of this approach with some examples including bacteria filament and tumor growth. These examples are followed by more detailed studies of erythropoiesis and immune response. Erythrocytes are produced in the bone marrow in small cellular units called erythroblastic islands. Each island is formed by a central macrophage surrounded by erythroid progenitors in different stages of maturity. Their choice between self-renewal, differentiation and apoptosis is determined by the ERK/Fas regulation and by a growth factor produced by the macrophage. Normal functioning of erythropoiesis can be compromised by the development of multiple myeloma, a malignant blood disorder which leads to a destruction of erythroblastic islands and to sever anemia. The last part of the work is devoted to the applications of hybrid models to study immune response and the development of viral infection. A two-scale model describing processes in a lymph node and other organs including the blood compartment is presented.

The development of a viral infection in the organism is a complex process which depends on the competition race between virus replication in the host cells and the immune response. To study different regimes of infection progression, we analyze the general mathematical model of immune response to viral infection. The model consists of two ODEs for virus and immune cells non-dimensionalized concentrations. The proliferation rate of immune cells in the model is represented by a bell-shaped function of the virus concentration. This function increases for small virus concentrations describing the antigen-stimulated clonal expansion of immune cells, and decreases for sufficiently high virus concentrations describing down-regulation of immune cells proliferation by the infection. Depending on the virus virulence, strength of the immune response, and the initial viral load, the model predicts several scenarios: (a) infection can be completely eliminated, (b) it can remain at a low level while the concentration of immune cells is high; (c) immune cells can be essentially exhausted, or (d) completely exhausted, which is accompanied (c, d) by high virus concentration. The analysis of the model shows that virus concentration can oscillate as it gradually converges to its equilibrium value. We show that the considered model can be obtained by the reduction of a more general model with an additional equation for the total viral load provided that this equation is fast. In the case of slow kinetics of the total viral load, this more general model should be used.

The short-term prediction of road traffic condition is one of the main tasks of transportation modelling. The main purpose of which are traffic control, reporting of accidents, avoiding traffic jams due to knowledge of traffic flow and subsequent transportation planning. A number of solutions exist — both model-driven and data driven had proven to be successful in capturing the dynamics of traffic flow. Nevertheless, most space-time models suffer from high mathematical complexity and low efficiency. Artificial Neural Networks, one of the prominent datadriven approaches, show promising performance in modelling the complexity of traffic flow. We present a neural network architecture for traffic flow prediction on a real-world road network graph. The model is based on the combination of a recurrent neural network and graph convolutional neural network. Where a recurrent neural network is used to model temporal dependencies, and a convolutional neural network is responsible for extracting spatial features from traffic. To make multiple few steps ahead predictions, the encoder-decoder architecture is used, which allows to reduce noise propagation due to inexact predictions. To model the complexity of traffic flow, we employ multilayered architecture. Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. To speed up the training process, we use skip-connections between each layer, so that each layer teaches only the residual function with respect to the previous layer outputs. The resulting neural network was trained on raw data from traffic flow detectors from the US highway system with a resolution of 5 minutes. 3 metrics: mean absolute error, mean relative error, mean-square error were used to estimate the quality of the prediction. It was found that for all metrics the proposed model achieved lower prediction error than previously published models, such as Vector Auto Regression, LSTM and Graph Convolution GRU.

The method of balanced identification was used to describe the response of Net Ecosystem Exchange of CO₂ (NEE) to change of environmental factors, and to fill the gaps in continuous CO₂ flux measurements in a sphagnum peat bog in the Tver region. The measurements were provided in the peat bog by the eddy covariance method from August to November of 2017. Due to rainy weather conditions and recurrent periods with low atmospheric turbulence the gap proportion in measured CO₂ fluxes at our experimental site during the entire period of measurements exceeded 40%. The model developed for the gap filling in long-term experimental data considers the NEE as a difference between Ecosystem Respiration (RE) and Gross Primary Production (GPP), i.e. key processes of ecosystem functioning, and their dependence on incoming solar radiation (Q), soil temperature (T), water vapor pressure deficit (VPD) and ground water level (WL). Applied for this purpose the balanced identification method is based on the search for the optimal ratio between the model simplicity and the data fitting accuracy — the ratio providing the minimum of the modeling error estimated by the cross validation method. The obtained numerical solutions are characterized by minimum necessary nonlinearity (curvature) that provides sufficient interpolation and extrapolation characteristics of the developed models. It is particularly important to fill the missing values in NEE measurements. Reviewing the temporary variability of NEE and key environmental factors allowed to reveal a statistically significant dependence of GPP on Q, T, and VPD, and RE — on T and WL, respectively. At the same time, the inaccuracy of applied method for simulation of the mean daily NEE, was less than 10%, and the error in NEE estimates by the method was higher than by the REddyProc model considering the influence on NEE of fewer number of environmental parameters. Analyzing the gap-filled time series of NEE allowed to derive the diurnal and inter-daily variability of NEE and to obtain cumulative CO₂ fluxs in the peat bog for selected summer-autumn period. It was shown, that the rate of CO₂ fixation by peat bog vegetation in August was significantly higher than the rate of ecosystem respiration, while since September due to strong decrease of GPP the peat bog was turned into a consistent source of CO₂ for the atmosphere.

Rugose spiraling whitefly (RSW) is one of the major pests which affects the coconut trees. It feeds on the tree by sucking up the water content as well as the essential nutrients from leaves. It also forms sooty mold in leaves due to which the process of photosynthesis is inhibited. Biocontrol of pest is harmless for trees and crops. The experimental results in literature reveal that Pseudomallada astur is a potential predator for this pest. We investigate the dynamics of predator, Pseudomallada astur’s interaction with rugose spiralling whitefly, Aleurodicus rugioperculatus in coconut trees using a mathematical model. In this system of ordinary differential equation, the pest-predator interaction is modeled using Holling type III functional response. The parametric values are calculated from the experimental results and are tabulated. An approximate analytical solution for the system has been derived. The homotopy analysis method proves to be a suitable method for creating solutions that are valid even for moderate to large parameter values, hence we employ the same to solve this nonlinear model. The $\hbar$-curves, which give the admissible region of $\hbar$, are provided to validate the region of convergence. We have derived the approximate solution at fifth order and stopped at this order since we obtain a more approximate solution in this iteration. Numerical simulation is obtained through MATLAB. The analytical results are compared with numerical simulation and are found to be in good agreement. The biological interpretation of figures implies that the use of a predator reduces the whitefly’s growth to a greater extent.

The functioning of DNA regulatory regions rely primarily on their physicochemical and structural properties but not on nucleotide sequences, i.e. ‘genetic text’. The formers are responsible for coding of DNA-protein interactions that govern various regulatory events. One of the characteristics is SIDD (Stress-Induced Duplex Destabilization) that quantify DNA duplex region propensity to melt under the imposed superhelical stress. The duplex property has been shown to participate in activity of various regulatory regions. Here we employ the SIDD model to calculate melting probability profiles for T7 bacteriophage promoter sequences. The genome is characterized by small size (approximately 40 thousand nucleotides) and temporal organization of expression: at the first stage of infection early T7 DNA region is transcribed by the host cell RNA polymerase, later on in life cycle phage-specific RNA polymerase performs transcription of class II and class III genes regions. Differential recognition of a particular group of promoters by the enzyme cannot be solely explained by their nucleotide sequences, because of, among other reasons, it is fairly similar among most the promoters. At the same time SIDD profiles obtained vary significantly and are clearly separated into groups corresponding to functional promoter classes of T7 DNA. For example, early promoters are affected by the same maximally destabilized DNA duplex region located at the varying region of a particular promoter. class II promoters lack substantially destabilized regions close to transcription start sites. Class III promoters, in contrast, demonstrate characteristic melting probability maxima located in the near-downstream region in all cases. Therefore, the apparent differences among the promoter groups with exceptional textual similarity (class II and class III differ by only few singular substitutions) were established. This confirms the major impact of DNA primary structure on the duplex parameter as well as a need for a broad genetic context consideration. The differences in melting probability profiles obtained using SIDD model alongside with other DNA physicochemical properties appears to be involved in differential promoter recognition by RNA polymerases.

In the present paper the application of the kinetic methods to the blood flow problems in elastic vessels is studied. The Lattice Boltzmann (LB) kinetic equation is applied. This model describes the discretized in space and time dynamics of particles traveling in a one-dimensional Cartesian lattice. At the limit of the small times between collisions LB models describe hydrodynamic equations which are equivalent to the Navier – Stokes for compressible if the considered flow is slow (small Mach number). If one formally changes in the resulting hydrodynamic equations the variables corresponding to density and sound wave velocity by luminal area and pulse wave velocity then a well-known 1D equations for the blood flow motion in elastic vessels are obtained for a particular case of constant pulse wave speed.

In reality the pulse wave velocity is a function of luminal area. Here an interesting analogy is observed: the equation of state (which defines sound wave velocity) becomes pressure-area relation. Thus, a generalization of the equation of state is needed. This procedure popular in the modeling of non-ideal gas and is performed using an introduction of a virtual force. This allows to model arbitrary pressure-area dependence in the resulting hemodynamic equations.

Two test case problems are considered. In the first problem a propagation of a sole nonlinear pulse wave is studied in the case of the Laplace pressure-area response. In the second problem the pulse wave dynamics is considered for a vessel bifurcation. The results show good precision in comparison with the data from literature.

This article solves the problem of developing a technology for collecting initial data for building models for assessing the functional state of a person. This condition is assessed by the pupil response of a person to a change in illumination based on the pupillometry method. This method involves the collection and analysis of initial data (pupillograms), presented in the form of time series characterizing the dynamics of changes in the human pupils to a light impulse effect. The drawbacks of the traditional approach to the collection of initial data using the methods of computer vision and smoothing of time series are analyzed. Attention is focused on the importance of the quality of the initial data for the construction of adequate mathematical models. The need for manual marking of the iris and pupil circles is updated to improve the accuracy and quality of the initial data. The stages of the proposed technology for collecting initial data are described. An example of the obtained pupillogram is given, which has a smooth shape and does not contain outliers, noise, anomalies and missing values. Based on the presented technology, a software and hardware complex has been developed, which is a collection of special software with two main modules, and hardware implemented on the basis of a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B microcomputer, with peripheral equipment that implements the specified functionality. To evaluate the effectiveness of the developed technology, models of a single-layer perspetron and a collective of neural networks are used, for the construction of which the initial data on the functional state of intoxication of a person were used. The studies have shown that the use of manual marking of the initial data (in comparison with automatic methods of computer vision) leads to a decrease in the number of errors of the 1st and 2nd years of the kind and, accordingly, to an increase in the accuracy of assessing the functional state of a person. Thus, the presented technology for collecting initial data can be effectively used to build adequate models for assessing the functional state of a person by pupillary response to changes in illumination. The use of such models is relevant in solving individual problems of ensuring transport security, in particular, monitoring the functional state of drivers.

This paper focuses on the problem of modeling and analyzing dynamic regimes, both regular and chaotic, in systems of coupled populations in the presence of random disturbances. The discrete Ricker model is used as the initial deterministic population model. The paper examines the dynamics of two populations coupled by migration. Migration is proportional to the difference between the densities of two populations with a coupling coefficient responsible for the strength of the migration flow. Isolated population subsystems, modeled by the Ricker map, exhibit various dynamic modes, including equilibrium, periodic, and chaotic ones. In this study, the coupling coefficient is treated as a bifurcation parameter and the parameters of natural population growth rate remain fixed. Under these conditions, one subsystem is in the equilibrium mode, while the other exhibits chaotic behavior. The coupling of two populations through migration creates new dynamic regimes, which were not observed in the isolated model. This article aims to analyze the dynamics of corporate systems with variations in the flow intensity between population subsystems. The article presents a bifurcation analysis of the attractors in a deterministic model of two coupled populations, identifies zones of monostability and bistability, and gives examples of regular and chaotic attractors. The main focus of the work is in comparing the stability of dynamic regimes against random disturbances in the migration intensity. Noise-induced transitions from a periodic attractor to a chaotic attractor are identified and described using direct numerical simulation methods. The Lyapunov exponents are used to analyze stochastic phenomena. It has been shown that in this model, there is a region of change in the bifurcation parameter in which, even with an increase in the intensity of random perturbations, there is no transition from order to chaos. For the analytical study of noise-induced transitions, the stochastic sensitivity function technique and the confidence domain method are used. The paper demonstrates how this mathematical tool can be employed to predict the critical noise intensity that causes a periodic regime to transform into a chaotic one.