A Review of Research in Illicit Supply-Chain Networks and New Directions to Thwart them

Advancing interdisciplinary science for disrupting wildlife trafficking networks

“…To advance scientific understanding of WTNs, we were inspired by the concept of supply chain resilience, or supply network resilience (SNR)—the ability of supply networks to operate in the face of disturbance and disruption without a substantial decrease in performance. Understanding the operational resilience of illicit supply networks is an almost ubiquitous contemporary need, as illicit trade has emerged as a significant problem for almost every government in the world ( 11 ). This ubiquity, combined with broad gaps in knowledge, encouraged us to explore new opportunities to explore advanced analytical methods from licit supply networks to help make more effective and efficient decisions about disrupting WTN operations ( 12 ), whether they are disrupted via law enforcement activities, social marketing, or economic incentive programs designed to shift or reduce or minimize harm.…”

Optimizing edge sets in networks to produce ground truth communities based on modularity

“…In the case where G is unweighted, that is, w ij = 1 for all (i, j) ∈ E and w ij = 0 for all (i, j) ∉ E, we can derive an equivalent model for model (3) that is an integer linear program. In this case, Ē will be the set of edges that can be added to the network, and Q P (E ′ ) will be the modularity of the partition P in the network G ′ = (V, E ∪ E ′ ), where E ′ = {(i, j) ∈ Ē ∶ b ij = 1}.…”

“…Law enforcement agencies have been turning to social network analysis in order to augment their investigations [3,16,19,36,51,52,54]. In particular, the problem of edge augmentation is of high importance to law enforcement; it is known that participants in illicit networks attempt to hide their activities from law enforcement in order to avoid detection [6,24,50].…”