Interdicting restructuring networks with applications in illicit trafficking

Daniel Kosmas, Thomas C. Sharkey, John E. Mitchell, Kayse Lee Maass and Lauren Martin

European Journal of Operational Research, 2023, vol. 308, issue 2, 832-851

Abstract: We consider a new class of max flow network interdiction problems, where the defender is able to introduce new arcs to the network after the attacker has made their interdiction decisions. We prove properties of when this restructuring will not increase the value of the minimum cut, which has important practical interpretations for problems of disrupting drug trafficking networks. In particular, it demonstrates that disrupting lower levels of these networks will not impact their operations when replacing the disrupted participants is easy. For the bilevel mixed integer linear programming formulation of this problem, we devise a column-and-constraint generation (C&CG) algorithm to solve it. Our approach uses partial information on the feasibility of restructuring plans and is shown to be orders of magnitude faster than previous C&CG methods. We demonstrate that applying decisions from standard max flow network interdiction problems can result in significantly higher flows than interdictions that account for the restructuring.

Keywords: OR in societal problem analysis; Network interdiction; Drug trafficking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037722172200916X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:308:y:2023:i:2:p:832-851

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2022.11.048

Access Statistics for this article

European Journal of Operational Research is currently edited by Roman Slowinski, Jesus Artalejo, Jean-Charles. Billaut, Robert Dyson and Lorenzo Peccati

More articles in European Journal of Operational Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().