Workshop: Disrupting Illicit Supply Networks: New Applications of Operations Research and Data Analytics to End Modern Slavery; Austin, Texas, and Washington, DC

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

This award provides support for a workshop to convene an interdisciplinary team of scholars to identify promising research directions for applications of operations research (OR) and data analytics aimed at the disruption of illicit supply networks such as human trafficking. The United States Department of State considers human trafficking a form of modern-day slavery and broadly defines it to be when a person is deceived or coerced in situations of prostitution, forced labor, or domestic servitude. Human trafficking is a key example of illicit networks that operate in and to the detriment of society. Other examples include arms trafficking, drug trafficking, animal trafficking, and human smuggling. By bringing together scholars from disparate disciplines, the goal of the workshop is to identify new research approaches and breakthrough strategies for disrupting the illicit networks commonly found in human trafficking. The workshop, which will consist of two meetings, the first to be held at The University of Texas at Austin and the second to be held in Washington, DC, will enable scholars from operations research, management science, analytics, machine learning, and data science to exchange ideas and outline a potential research agenda for the development of disruptive interventions against illicit networks. The agenda developed at this workshop will help move understanding of such illicit systems from descriptive characterization and predictive estimation toward improved dynamic operational control. OR and data analytics are fields ideally suited to bring this perspective to the study of illicit networks. Few studies have approached this problem from a dynamic systems theoretical perspective that allows the social justice challenge to be represented as a mathematical system that can be analyzed in terms of decision variables to help guide, control, and constrain behavioral dynamics toward desired goals. Solutions to remediate the effect of illicit networks are inherently interdisciplinary, typically involving the fields of criminal justice, social work, social science, economics, healthcare, and law. Such systems are dynamic and exploit and victimize members of the community. What is more, they involve both legal and illicit activities at the same time, which often obscures criminal activity from law enforcement. These systems can be hierarchical, nonstationary networks of interconnected activities and participants that involve intersectional decision making by perpetrators, victims, and/or bystanders. Highly common among such systems is a paucity of data due in large part to the hidden aspects of the crime and the partial observability of the population of interest. The workshop aims include examining the structure and nature of illicit networks within an analytic and modeling framework; exploring the form and complexity of viable, real-world solutions using OR methodologies; assessing the characteristics and amount of data needed to model and analyze the problem; proposing a research agenda to guide the efforts of interdisciplinary teams of scholars to develop methods and solutions; and initiating and facilitating ongoing interactions among workshop attendees and their research collaborators, including junior investigators and graduate students.