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Simulation of combat and military operations is the most important scientific and practical task aimed at providing the command of quantitative bases for decision-making. The first models of combat were developed during the First World War (M. Osipov, F. Lanchester), and now they are widely used in connection with the massive introduction of automation tools. At the same time, the models of combat and war do not fully take into account the moral potentials of the parties to the conflict, which motivates and motivates the further development of models of battle and war. A probabilistic model of combat is considered, in which the parameter of combat superiority is determined through the parameter of moral (the ratio of the percentages of the losses sustained by the parties) and the parameter of technological superiority. To assess the latter, the following is taken into account: command experience (ability to organize coordinated actions), reconnaissance, fire and maneuverability capabilities of the parties and operational (combat) support capabilities. A game-based offensive-defense model has been developed, taking into account the actions of the first and second echelons (reserves) of the parties. The target function of the attackers in the model is the product of the probability of a breakthrough by the first echelon of one of the defense points by the probability of the second echelon of the counterattack repelling the reserve of the defenders. Solved the private task of managing the breakthrough of defense points and found the optimal distribution of combat units between the trains. The share of troops allocated by the parties to the second echelon (reserve) increases with an increase in the value of the aggregate combat superiority parameter of those advancing and decreases with an increase in the value of the combat superiority parameter when repelling a counterattack. When planning a battle (battles, operations) and the distribution of its troops between echelons, it is important to know not the exact number of enemy troops, but their capabilities and capabilities, as well as the degree of preparedness of the defense, which does not contradict the experience of warfare. Depending on the conditions of the situation, the goal of an offensive may be to defeat the enemy, quickly capture an important area in the depth of the enemy’s defense, minimize their losses, etc. For scaling the offensive-defense model for targets, the dependencies of the losses and the onset rate on the initial ratio of the combat potentials of the parties were found. The influence of social costs on the course and outcome of wars is taken into account. A theoretical explanation is given of a loss in a military company with a technologically weak adversary and with a goal of war that is unclear to society. To account for the influence of psychological operations and information wars on the moral potential of individuals, a model of social and information influence was used.

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.

Posts on social networks can both predict the movement of the financial market, and in some cases even determine its direction. The analysis of posts on Twitter contributes to the prediction of cryptocurrency prices. The specificity of the community is represented in a special vocabulary. Thus, slang expressions and abbreviations are used in posts, the presence of which makes it difficult to vectorize text data, as a result of which preprocessing methods such as Stanza lemmatization and the use of regular expressions are considered. This paper describes created simplest machine learning models, which may work despite such problems as lack of data and short prediction timeframe. A word is considered as an element of a binary vector of a data unit in the course of the problem of binary classification solving. Basic words are determined according to the frequency analysis of mentions of a word. The markup is based on Binance candlesticks with variable parameters for a more accurate description of the trend of price changes. The paper introduces metrics that reflect the distribution of words depending on their belonging to a positive or negative classes. To solve the classification problem, we used a dense model with parameters selected by Keras Tuner, logistic regression, a random forest classifier, a naive Bayesian classifier capable of working with a small sample, which is very important for our task, and the k-nearest neighbors method. The constructed models were compared based on the accuracy metric of the predicted labels. During the investigation we recognized that the best approach is to use models which predict price movements of a single coin. Our model deals with posts that mention LUNA project, which no longer exist. This approach to solving binary classification of text data is widely used to predict the price of an asset, the trend of its movement, which is often used in automated trading.

We consider strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle-point problems with general non-bilinear objective and different condition numbers with respect to the primal and dual variables. First, we consider such problems with smooth composite terms, one of which has finite-sum structure. For this setting we propose a variance reduction algorithm with complexity estimates superior to the existing bounds in the literature. Second, we consider finite-sum saddle-point problems with composite terms and propose several algorithms depending on the properties of the composite terms. When the composite terms are smooth we obtain better complexity bounds than the ones in the literature, including the bounds of a recently proposed nearly-optimal algorithms which do not consider the composite structure of the problem. If the composite terms are prox-friendly, we propose a variance reduction algorithm that, on the one hand, is accelerated compared to existing variance reduction algorithms and, on the other hand, provides in the composite setting similar complexity bounds to the nearly-optimal algorithm which is designed for noncomposite setting. Besides, our algorithms allow one to separate the complexity bounds, i. e. estimate, for each part of the objective separately, the number of oracle calls that is sufficient to achieve a given accuracy. This is important since different parts can have different arithmetic complexity of the oracle, and it is desired to call expensive oracles less often than cheap oracles. The key thing to all these results is our general framework for saddle-point problems, which may be of independent interest. This framework, in turn is based on our proposed Accelerated Meta-Algorithm for composite optimization with probabilistic inexact oracles and probabilistic inexactness in the proximal mapping, which may be of independent interest as well.

Numerical modeling of shear-induced platelet activation in haemodialysis arteriovenous fistulas was carried out in this work. The goal was to investigate the mechanisms of threshold shear-induced platelet activation in fistulas. For shear-induced platelet activation to take place, shear stress accumulated by platelets along corresponding trajectories in blood flow had to exceed a definite threshold value. The threshold value of cumulative shear stress was supposed to depend on the multimer size of von Willebrand factor macromolecules acting as hydrodynamic sensors for platelets. The effect of arteriovenous fistulas parameters, such as the anastomotic angle, blood flow rate, and the multimer size of von Willebrand factor macromolecules, on platelet activation risk was studied. Parametric diagrams have been constructed that make it possible to distinguish the areas of parameters corresponding to the presence or absence of shear-induced platelet activation. Scaling relations that approximate critical curves on parametric diagrams were obtained. Analysis showed that threshold fistula flow rate is higher for obtuse anastomotic angle than for sharp ones. This means that a fistula with obtuse angle can be used in wider flow rate range without risk of platelet activation. In addition, a study of different anastomosis configurations of arteriovenous fistulas showed that the configuration “end of vein to end of artery” is among the safest. For all the investigated anastomosis configurations, the critical curves on the parametric diagrams were monotonically decreasing functions of von Willebrand factor multimer size. It was shown that fistula flow rate should have a significant impact on the probability of thrombus formation initiation, while the direction of flow through the distal artery did not affect platelet activation. The obtained results allowed to determine the safest fistula configurations with respect to thrombus formation triggering. The authors believe that the results of the work may be of interest to doctors performing surgical operations for creation of arteriovenous fistulas for haemodialysis. In the final section of the work, possible clinical applications of the obtained results by means of mathematical modeling are discussed.

Based on the Holstein Hamiltonian, the dynamics of the charge introduced into the molecular chain of sites was modeled at different temperatures. In the calculation, the temperature of the chain is set by the initial data ¡ª random Gaussian distributions of velocities and site displacements. Various options for the initial charge density distribution are considered. Long-term calculations show that the system moves to fluctuations near a new equilibrium state. For the same initial velocities and displacements, the average kinetic energy, and, accordingly, the temperature of the T chain, varies depending on the initial distribution of the charge density: it decreases when a polaron is introduced into the chain, or increases if at the initial moment the electronic part of the energy is maximum. A comparison is made with the results obtained previously in the model with a Langevin thermostat. In both cases, the existence of a polaron is determined by the thermal energy of the entire chain.

According to the simulation results, the transition from the polaron mode to the delocalized state occurs in the same range of thermal energy values of a chain of $N$ sites ~ $NT$ for both thermostat options, with an additional adjustment: for the Hamiltonian system the temperature does not correspond to the initially set one, but is determined after long-term calculations from the average kinetic energy of the chain.

In the polaron region, the use of different methods for simulating temperature leads to a number of significant differences in the dynamics of the system. In the region of the delocalized state of charge, for high temperatures, the results averaged over a set of trajectories in a system with a random force and the results averaged over time for a Hamiltonian system are close, which does not contradict the ergodic hypothesis. From a practical point of view, for large temperatures T ≈ 300 K, when simulating charge transfer in homogeneous chains, any of these options for setting the thermostat can be used.

The model of the process of using machinery and equipment is considered, which takes into account the probabilistic nature of the process of their operation and sale. It takes into account the possibility of random hidden failures, after which the condition of the machine deteriorates abruptly, as well as the randomly arising need for premature (before the end of its service life) sale of the machine, which requires, generally speaking, random time. The model is focused on assessing the market value and service life of machines in accordance with International Valuation Standards. Strictly speaking, the market value of a used machine depends on its technical condition, but in practice, appraisers only take into account its age, since generally accepted measures of the technical condition of machines do not yet exist. As a result, the market value of a used machine is assumed to be equal to the average market value of similar machines of the corresponding age. For these purposes, appraisers use coefficients that reflect the influence of the age of machines on their market value. Such coefficients are not always justified and do not take into account either the degradation of the machine or the probabilistic nature of the process of its use. The proposed model is based on the anticipation of benefits principle. In it, we characterize the state of the machine by the intensity of the benefits it brings. The machine is subjected to a complex Poisson failure process, and after failure its condition abruptly worsens and may even reach its limit. Situations also arise that preclude further use of the machine by its owner. In such situations, the owner puts the machine up for sale before the end of its service life (prematurely), and the sale requires a random timing. The model allows us to take into account the influence of such situations and construct an analytical relationship linking the market value of a machine with its condition, and calculate the average coefficients of change in the market value of machines with age. At the same time, it is also possible to take into account the influence of inflation and the scrap cost of the machine. We have found that the rate of prematurely sales has a significant impact on the cost of new and used machines. The model also allows us to take into account the influence of inflation and the scrap value of the machine. We have found that the rate of premature sales has a significant impact on the service life and market value of new and used machines. At the same time, the dependence of the market value of machines on age is largely determined by the coefficient of variation of the service life of the machines. The results obtained allow us to obtain more reasonable estimates of the market value of machines, including for the purposes of the system of national accounts.

The paper outlines the approaches to mathematical modeling correlation adaptometry techniques widely used in biology and medicine. The analysis is based on models employed in descriptions of structured biological systems. It is assumed that the distribution density of the biological population numbers satisfies the equation of Kolmogorov-Fokker-Planck. Using this technique evaluated the effectiveness of treatment of patients with obesity. All patients depending on the obesity degree and the comorbidity nature were divided into three groups. Shows a decrease in weight of the correlation graph computed from the measured in the patients of the indicators that characterizes the effectiveness of the treatment for all studied groups. This technique was also used to assess the intensity of the training loads in academic rowing three age groups. It was shown that with the highest voltage worked with athletes for youth group. Also, using the technique of correlation adaptometry evaluated the effectiveness of the treatment of hormone replacement therapy in women. All the patients depending on the assigned drug were divided into four groups. In the standard analysis of the dynamics of mean values of indicators, it was shown that in the course of the treatment were observed normalization of the averages for all groups of patients. However, using the technique of correlation adaptometry it was found that during the first six months the weight of the correlation graph was decreasing and during the second six months the weight increased for all study groups. This indicates the excessive length of the annual course of hormone replacement therapy and the practicality of transition to a semiannual rate.

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 theoretical study of consensus makes it possible to analyze the various situations that social groups that make decisions in this way have to face in real life, abstracting from the specific characteristics of the groups. It is relevant for practice to study the dynamics of a social group consisting of loyal experts who, in the process of seeking consensus, yield to each other. In this case, psychological “traps” such as false consensus or groupthink are possible, which can sometimes lead to managerial decisions with dire consequences.

The article builds a mathematical consensus model for a group of loyal experts based on modeling using regular Markov chains. Analysis of the model showed that with an increase in the loyalty (decrease in authoritarianism) of group members, the time to reach consensus increases exponentially (the number of agreements increases), which is apparently due to the lack of desire among experts to take part of the responsibility for the decision being made. An increase in the size of such a group leads (ceteris paribus):

– to reduce the number of approvals to consensus in the conditions of striving for absolute loyalty of members, i. e. each additional loyal member adds less and less “strength” to the group;

– to a logarithmic increase in the number of approvals in the context of an increase in the average authoritarianism of members. It is shown that in a small group (two people), the time for reaching consensus can increase by more than 10 times compared to a group of 5 or more members), in the group there is a transfer of responsibility for making decisions.

It is proved that in the case of a group of two absolutely loyal members, consensus is unattainable.

A reasonable conclusion is made that consensus in a group of loyal experts is a special (special) case of consensus, since the dependence of the time until consensus is reached on the authoritarianism of experts and their number in the group is described by different curves than in the case of a regular group of experts.