EAGER: ISN: Disrupting Exploitation and Trafficking Labor Supply Networks in Post-Harvey Rebuild

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

This EArly-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project will contribute to the national security, prosperity and welfare by improving understanding of the states of laborers exploitation and trafficking that often occurs in the chaotic rebuild and recovery environment following a natural disaster. Construction workers are extremely vulnerable to exploitation and human trafficking, especially in the post-disaster settings. Through retrospective interviews among Houston-area laborers, this project will facilitate scientific understanding of the illicit supply networks in the construction industry in the post-Harvey rebuilding efforts and evaluate potential countermeasures for their disruption. The project will be a first step toward disrupting human trafficking in other industry sectors. It will involve early-career scholars, graduate students, women, minorities, and multiple institutions, and will more broadly facilitate future involvement of the operations research community in the disruption of illicit supply networks. This research project will address several novel and unique features encountered in the complex post-disaster labor trafficking ecosystem, including stochastic systems with partial information to capture the case where a laborer's state cannot be directly observed. In addition, the employment status of construction laborers generally changes relatively frequently. These status or state changes and the associated decisions and actions by ecosystem participants will require researchers to explore the merit of multi-period dynamic stochastic games in capturing these dynamics. The planned multi-agent stochastic decision-making framework will be developed based on real-world evidence from the retrospective field interviews wherein laborers will provide a recalled trajectory of employment and behaviors experienced since Hurricane Harvey or their arrival to the affected region. The partial observability of victims and adaptive behavior of the traffickers will also be captured. Stochastic model development will be supported and evaluated with multiagent simulation models. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.