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At present, the accelerator complex NICA is being built at JINR (Dubna). It is intended for performing experiments to study interactions of relativistic nuclei and polarized particles (protons and deuterons). One of the experimental facilitues MPD (MultiPurpose Detector) was designed to investigate nucleus-nucleus, protonnucleus and proton-proton interactions. The existing plans of future MPD upgrade consider a possibility to install an inner tracker made of the new generation silicon pixel sensors. It is expected that such a detector will considerably enhance the research capability of the experiment both for nucleus-nucleus interactions (due to a high spatial resolution near the collision region) and proton-proton ones (due to a fast detector response).

This paper presents main characteristics of such a tracker, obtained using a Monte-Carlo simulation of the detector for proton-proton collisions. In particular, the detector ability to reconstruct decay vertices of short-lived particles and perform a selection of rare events of such decays from much more frequent “common” interactions are evaluated. Also, the problem of a separation of multiple collisions during the high luminosity accelerator running and the task of detector triggering on rare events are addressed. The results obtained can be used to justify the necessity to build such a detector and to develop a high-level trigger system, possibly based on machine learning techniques.

The SAS program is the primary data processing tool for the YuMO small-angle neutron scattering spectrometer. The paper presents a retrospective analysis of its two-decade evolution, from a Fortran prototype to a modern software system. The analysis focuses on the architectural decisions that have ensured the program’s long-term viability and its ability to adapt to instrument upgrades.

The core solution was a modular architecture that abstracts the detector system. This enabled the seamless integration of data from two scattering detectors and, later, from a position-sensitive detector. A strict processing pipeline and a unified internal data representation formed the basis for physically grounded algorithms, including weighted merging of spectra, resolution-aware smoothing, and built-in statistical quality control. The program’s interfaces—a command line for batch processing and a graphical user interface for interactive work—are built upon a single computational core, ensuring result consistency and flexibility in use.

Long-term operation has confirmed that the underlying architectural principles naturally align with the key characteristics of international software quality standards, particularly those critical for long-term sustainability. Therefore, the development and evolution of SAS demonstrates a universal set of architectural principles that can serve as a foundation for building sustainable scientific software in related fields of experimental physics.

This work provides a new approach for constructing high-precision routes based on data from transport detectors inside the SUMO traffic modeling package. Existing tools such as flowrouter and routeSampler have a number of disadvantages, such as the lack of interaction with the network in the process of building routes. Our rlRouter uses multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where the agents are incoming lanes and the environment is the road network. By performing actions to launch vehicles, agents receive a reward for matching data from transport detectors. Parameter Sharing DQN with the LSTM backbone of the Q-function was used as an algorithm for multi-agent reinforcement learning.

Since the rlRouter is trained inside the SUMO simulation, it can restore routes better by taking into account the interaction of vehicles within the network with each other and with the network infrastructure. We have modeled diverse traffic situations on three different junctions in order to compare the performance of SUMO’s routers with the rlRouter. We used Mean Absoluter Error (MAE) as the measure of the deviation from both cumulative detectors and routes data. The rlRouter achieved the highest compliance with the data from the detectors. We also found that by maximizing the reward for matching detectors, the resulting routes also get closer to the real ones. Despite the fact that the routes recovered using rlRouter are superior to the routes obtained using SUMO tools, they do not fully correspond to the real ones, due to the natural limitations of induction-loop detectors. To achieve more plausible routes, it is necessary to equip junctions with other types of transport counters, for example, camera detectors.

The problem of optimal control of traffic flow in an urban road network is considered. The control is carried out by varying the duration of the working phases of traffic lights at controlled intersections. A description of the control system developed is given. The control system enables the use of three types of control: open-loop, feedback and manual. In feedback control, road infrastructure detectors, video cameras, inductive loop and radar detectors are used to determine the quantitative characteristics of current traffic flow state. The quantitative characteristics of the traffic flows are fed into a mathematical model of the traffic flow, implemented in the computer environment of an automatic traffic flow control system, in order to determine the moments for switching the working phases of the traffic lights. The model is a system of finite-difference recurrent equations and describes the change in traffic flow on each road section at each time step, based on retrived data on traffic flow characteristics in the network, capacity of maneuvers and flow distribution through alternative maneuvers at intersections. The model has scaling and aggregation properties. The structure of the model depends on the structure of the graph of the controlled road network. The number of nodes in the graph is equal to the number of road sections in the considered network. The simulation of traffic flow changes in real time makes it possible to optimally determine the duration of traffic light operating phases and to provide traffic flow control with feedback based on its current state. The system of automatic collection and processing of input data for the model is presented. In order to model the states of traffic flow in the network and to solve the problem of optimal traffic flow control, the CTraf software package has been developed, a brief description of which is given in the paper. An example of the solution of the optimal control problem of traffic flows on the basis of real data in the road network of Moscow is given.