Multi-period network interdiction problems with applications to city-level drug enforcement

Abstract

This article considers a new class of multi-period network interdiction problems that focus on scheduling the activities of law enforcement in order to successfully interdict criminals in an illegal drug supply chain. This class of problems possesses several novel features for interdiction problems that were motivated through collaborations with city-level drug enforcement officials. These features include modeling the temporal aspects of these interdictions and the requirements associated with building interdictions in order to arrest high-ranking criminals in the drug supply chain. Based on these collaborations a systematic procedure is developed to generate realistic test instances of the multi-period network interdiction problem. Computational analysis on these realistic test instances provides some direction to the policies that law enforcement should implement in their interdiction activities.

Keywords:

• Dynamic network interdiction
• scheduling
• drug enforcement
• policy-based analysis
• maximum flows

Notes

^†A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 2010 Industrial Engineering Research Conference.