All issues

The research is devoted to the problem of the use of social networks as a tool of the illegal activity and as a source of information that could be dangerous to society. The article presents the structure of the multiagent system with which a social network groups could be clustered according to the criteria uniquely defines a group as a destructive. The agents’ of the system clustering algorithm is described.

The article deals with the modeling of the number of employed population by branches of the economy at the national and regional levels. The lack of targeted distribution of workers in a market economy requires the study of systemic processes in the labor market that lead to different dynamics of the number of employed in the sectors of the economy. In this case, personal strategies for choosing labor activity by economic agents become important. The presence of different strategies leads to the emergence of strata in the labor market with a dynamically changing number of employees, unevenly distributed among the sectors of the economy. As a result, non-linear fluctuations in the number of employed population can be observed, the toolkit of agentbased modeling is relevant for the study of the fluctuations. In the article, we examined in-phase and anti-phase fluctuations in the number of employees by economic activity on the example of the Jewish Autonomous Region in Russia. The fluctuations found in the time series of statistical data for 2008–2016. We show that such fluctuations appear by age groups of workers. In view of this, we put forward a hypothesis that the agent in the labor market chooses a place of work by a strategy, related with his age group. It directly affects the distribution of the number of employed for different cohorts and the total number of employed in the sectors of the economy. The agent determines the strategy taking into account the socio-economic characteristics of the branches of the economy (different levels of wages, working conditions, prestige of the profession). We construct a basic agentoriented model of a three-branch economy to test the hypothesis. The model takes into account various strategies of economic agents, including the choice of the highest wages, the highest prestige of the profession and the best working conditions by the agent. As a result of numerical experiments, we show that the availability of various industry selection strategies and the age preferences of employers within the industry lead to periodic and complex dynamics of the number of different-aged employees. Age preferences may be a consequence, for example, the requirements of employer for the existence of work experience and education. Also, significant changes in the age structure of the employed population may result from migration.

In the present article we explore the process of changing the level of approval of a political leader under the influence of the processes taking place in online platforms (social networks, forums, etc.). The driver of these changes is the interaction of users, through which they can exchange opinions with each other and formulate their position in relation to the political leader. In addition to interpersonal interaction, we will consider such factors as the information impact, expressed in the creation of an information flow with a given power and polarity (positive or negative, in the context of influencing the image of a political leader), as well as the presence of a group of agents (opinion leaders), supporting the leader, or, conversely, negatively affecting its representation in the media space.

The mathematical basis of the presented research is the Kirman model, which has its roots in biology and initially found its application in economics. Within the framework of this model it is considered that each user is in one of the two possible states, and a Markov jump process describing transitions between these states is given. For the problem under consideration, these states are 0 or 1, depending on whether a particular agent is a supporter of a political leader or not. For further research, we find its diffusional approximation, known as the Jacoby process. With the help of spectral decomposition for the infinitesimal operator of this process we have an opportunity to find an analytical representation for the transition probability density.

Analyzing the probabilities obtained in this way, we can assess the influence of individual factors of the model: the power and direction of the information flow, available to online users and relevant to the tasks of rating formation, as well as the number of supporters or opponents of the politician. Next, using the found eigenfunctions and eigenvalues, we derive expressions for the evaluation of conditional mathematical expectations of a politician’s rating, which can serve as a basis for building forecasts that are important for the formation of a strategy of representing a political leader in the online environment.

This article discusses the influence of the shadow, informal and household sectors on the dynamics of a stochastic model with heterogeneous (heterogeneous) agents. The study uses the integration of the general equilibrium approach to explain the behavior of demand, supply and prices in an economy with several interacting markets, and a multi-agent approach. The analyzed model describes an economy with aggregated uncertainty and with an infinite number of heterogeneous agents (households). The source of heterogeneity is the idiosyncratic income shocks of agents in the legal and shadow sectors of the economy. In the analysis, an algorithm is used to approximate the dynamics of the distribution function of the capital stocks of individual agents — the dynamics of its first and second moments. The synthesis of the agent approach and the general equilibrium approach is carried out using computer implementation of the recursive feedback between microagents and macroenvironment. The behavior of the impulse response functions of the main variables of the model confirms the positive influence of the shadow economy (below a certain limit) on minimizing the rate of decline in economic indicators during recessions, especially for developing economies. The scientific novelty of the study is the combination of a multi-agent approach and a general equilibrium approach for modeling macroeconomic processes at the regional and national levels. Further research prospects may be associated with the use of more detailed general equilibrium models, which allow, in particular, to describe the behavior of heterogeneous groups of agents in the entrepreneurial sector of the economy.

In some cases, information warfare results in almost whole population accepting one of two contesting points of view and rejecting the other. In other cases, however, the “majority party” gets only a small advantage over the “minority party”. The relevant question is which network characteristics of a population contribute to the minority being able to maintain some significant numbers. Given that some societies are more connected than others, in the sense that they have a higher density of social ties, this question is specified as follows: how does the density of social ties affect the chances of a minority to maintain a significant number? Does a higher density contribute to a landslide victory of majority, or to resistance of minority? To address this issue, we consider information warfare between two parties, called the Left and the Right, in the population, which is represented as a network, the nodes of which are individuals, and the connections correspond to their acquaintance and describe mutual influence. At each of the discrete points in time, each individual decides which party to support based on their attitude, i. e. predisposition to the Left or Right party and taking into account the influence of his network ties. The influence means here that each tie sends a cue with a certain probability to the individual in question in favor of the party that themselves currently support. If the tie switches their party affiliation, they begin to agitate the individual in question for their “new” party. Such processes create dynamics, i. e. the process of changing the partisanship of individuals. The duration of the warfare is exogenously set, with the final time point roughly associated with the election day. The described model is numerically implemented on a scale-free network. Numerical experiments have been carried out for various values of network density. Because of the presence of stochastic elements in the model, 200 runs were conducted for each density value, for each of which the final number of supporters of each of the parties was calculated. It is found that with higher density, the chances increase that the winner will cover almost the entire population. Conversely, low network density contributes to the chances of a minority to maintain significant numbers.

Simulation multiagent model of artificial life was created. Competitive ad-vantages of directed movement and diverse strategies of its using in population of protozoa in illumination gradient were considered. The results consistent with r-K selection theory were obtained. Agents behavior in artificial ecosystem are in qualitative agreement with behavior observed in nature.

In the presented work, a hybrid optimal simulation model of an assembly shop in the AnyLogic environment has been developed, which allows you to select the parameters of production systems. To build a hybrid model of the investigative approach, discrete-event modeling and aggressive modeling are combined into a single model with an integrating interaction. Within the framework of this work, a mechanism for the development of a production system consisting of several participants-agents is described. An obvious agent corresponds to a class in which a set of agent parameters is specified. In the simulation model, three main groups of operations performed sequentially were taken into account, and the logic for working with rejected sets was determined. The product assembly process is a process that occurs in a multi-phase open-loop system of redundant service with waiting. There are also signs of a closed system — scrap flows for reprocessing. When creating a distribution system in the segment, it is mandatory to use control over the execution of requests in a FIFO queue. For the functional assessment of the production system, the simulation model includes several functional functions that describe the number of finished products, the average time of preparation of products, the number and percentage of rejects, the simulation result for the study, as well as functional variables in which the calculated utilization factors will be used. A series of modeling experiments were carried out in order to study the behavior of the agents of the system in terms of the overall performance indicators of the production system. During the experiment, it was found that the indicator of the average preparation time of the product is greatly influenced by such parameters as: the average speed of the set of products, the average time to complete operations. At a given limitation interval, we managed to select a set of parameters that managed to achieve the largest possible operation of the assembly line. This experiment implements the basic principle of agent-based modeling — decentralized agents make a personal contribution and affect the operation of the entire simulated system as a whole. As a result of the experiments, thanks to the selection of a large set of parameters, it was possible to achieve high performance indicators of the assembly shop, namely: to increase the productivity indicator by 60%; reduce the average assembly time of products by 38%.

Collective behavior can serve as a mechanism of thermoregulation and play a key role in the joint survival of a group of organisms. In higher animals, such phenomena are usually the subject of study of biology since sudden transitions to collective behavior are difficult to differentiate from the psychological and social adaptation of animals. However, in this paper, we indicate several important examples when a flock of higher animals demonstrates phase transitions similar to known phenomena in liquids and gases. This issue can also be studied experimentally within the framework of synthetic systems consisting of self-propelled robots that act according to a certain given algorithm. Generalizing both of these cases, we consider the problem of phase transitions in a dense group of interacting selfpropelled agents. Within the framework of microscopic theory, we propose a mathematical model of the phenomenon, in which agents are represented as bodies interacting with each other in accordance with an effective potential of a special type, expressing the desire of agents to move in the direction of the gradient of the joint thermal field. We show that the number of agents in the group, the group power, is the control parameter of the problem. A discrete model with individual dynamics of agents reproduces most of the phenomena observed both in natural flocks of higher animals engaged in collective thermoregulation and in synthetic complex systems. A first-order phase transition is observed, which symbolizes a change in the aggregate state in a group of agents. One observes the self-assembly of the initial weakly structured mass of agents into dense quasi-crystalline structures. We demonstrate also that, with an increase in the group power, a second-order phase transition in the form of thermal convection can occur. It manifests in a sudden liquefaction of the group and a transition to vortex motion, which ensures more efficient energy consumption in the case of a synthetic system of interacting robots and the collective survival of all individuals in the case of natural animal flocks.With an increase in the group power, secondary bifurcations occur, the vortex structure in agent medium becomes more complicated.

Classical Chanter–Thornley model of mushroom growth has been modified and implemented in AnyLogic simulation environment by means of system dynamics, discrete-event and agent-based approaches. A numerical case study of the model is presented and the problem of optimum age at harvest, providing the maximum integral yield for all fruiting “waves” is solved.

Distributed saddle point problems (SPPs) have numerous applications in optimization, matrix games and machine learning. For example, the training of generated adversarial networks is represented as a min-max optimization problem, and training regularized linear models can be reformulated as an SPP as well. This paper studies distributed nonsmooth SPPs with Lipschitz-continuous objective functions. The objective function is represented as a sum of several components that are distributed between groups of computational nodes. The nodes, or agents, exchange information through some communication network that may be centralized or decentralized. A centralized network has a universal information aggregator (a server, or master node) that directly communicates to each of the agents and therefore can coordinate the optimization process. In a decentralized network, all the nodes are equal, the server node is not present, and each agent only communicates to its immediate neighbors.

We assume that each of the nodes locally holds its objective and can compute its value at given points, i. e. has access to zero-order oracle. Zero-order information is used when the gradient of the function is costly, not possible to compute or when the function is not differentiable. For example, in reinforcement learning one needs to generate a trajectory to evaluate the current policy. This policy evaluation process can be interpreted as the computation of the function value. We propose an approach that uses a smoothing technique, i. e., applies a first-order method to the smoothed version of the initial function. It can be shown that the stochastic gradient of the smoothed function can be viewed as a random two-point gradient approximation of the initial function. Smoothing approaches have been studied for distributed zero-order minimization, and our paper generalizes the smoothing technique on SPPs.