A review of research in illicit supply-chain networks and new directions to thwart them

Abstract

Illicit trades have emerged as a significant problem to almost every government across the world. Their gradual expansion and diversification throughout the years suggests the existence of robust yet obscure supply chains as well as the inadequacy of current approaches to understand and disrupt them. In response, researchers have been trying hard to identify strategies that would succeed in controlling the proliferation of these trades. With the same motivation, this article conducts a comprehensive review of prior research in the field of illicit supply-chain networks. The review is primarily focused on the trade of physical products, ignoring virtual products and services. Our discussion includes analyses of their structure and operations, as well as procedures for their detection and disruption, especially from the perspective of operations research, management science, network science, and industrial engineering. We also address persisting challenges in this domain and offer future research directions to pursue.

Keywords:

• Illicit trade
• supply-chains
• disruption of illicit networks
• literature review
• future directions

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the Associate Editor for their helpful comments that have led to an improved paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rashid Anzoom

Rashid Anzoom is a PhD student in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He received his MSc (2019) and BSc (2017) degrees in industrial and production engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. Rashid’s research interest includes operations research, data analytics, and supply chain.

Rakesh Nagi

Rakesh Nagi is Donald Biggar Willett Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He served as the Department Head of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering (2013-2019). He is an affiliate faculty in CS, ECE, CSL, and CSE. Previously he served as the Chair (2006-2012) and Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) (1993-2013). He has more than 200 journal and conference publications. Dr. Nagi’s academic interests are in big graphs/data, social networks, GPU-accelerated computing, graph algorithms, production systems, applied/military operations research and data fusion using graph theoretic models.

Chrysafis Vogiatzis

Chrysafis Vogiatzis is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Previously he was an assistant professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University. He received his PhD (2014) and MS (2012) degrees in industrial and systems engineering at the University of Florida, and his Dipl. Eng. (2009) degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. His academic interests include network optimization and analysis, decomposition techniques for combinatorial optimization, and applied operations research.