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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.

This paper considers the problem of water consumption in the regions of Russia with low water availability. We provide a review of the existing methods to control quality and quantity of water resources at different scales — from households to worldwide. The paper itself considers regions with low “water availability” parameter which is amount of water per person per year. Special attention is paid to the regions, where this parameter is low because of natural features of the region, not because of high population. In such regions many resources are spend on water processing infrastructure to store water and transport water from other regions. In such regions the main water consumers are industry and agriculture.

We propose dynamic two-level hierarchical model which matches water consumption of a region with its gross regional product. On the top level there is a regional administration (supervisor) and on the lower level there are region enterprises (agents). The supervisor sets fees for water consumption. We study the model with Pontryagin’s maximum principle and provide agents’s optimal control in analytical form. For the supervisor’s control we provide numerical algorithm. The model has six free coefficients, which can be chosen so the model represents a particular region. We use data from Russia Federal State Statistics Service for identification process of a model. For numerical analysis we use trust region reflective algorithms. We provide calculations for a few regions with low water availability. It is shown that it is possible to reduce water consumption of a region more than by 20% while gross regional product drop is less than 10%.

Methods for modeling blood flow and its rheological properties are reviewed. Blood is considered as a particle suspencion. The methods are boundary integral equation method (BIEM), lattice Boltzmann (LBM), finite elements on dynamic mesh, dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) and agent based modeling. The analysis of these methods’ applications on high-performance systems with various architectures is presented.