Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

Generating Sex Trafficking Networks From Text Documents, Maria Diaz

All Theses

Qualitative coding is a long and strenuous process that requires a well-skilled investigator. Natural language processing techniques have made leaps and bounds as far as usability and application domain, although it does not work for every task. In this work, we have created a natural language processing framework to help qualitative coders automatically obtain the nodes and node arcs from federal case files, dockets, and indictments within a sex trafficking network. The produced nodes and arcs allows us to perform network modeling by providing us with the information needed to create network structures that can then be used for interdiction …

Park Equity Modeling: A Case Study Of Asheville, North Carolina, Anisa Young

All Theses

Parks and greenspaces are publicly available entities that serve the vital purpose of promoting multiple aspects of human welfare. Unfortunately, the existence of park disparities is commonplace within the park setting. Specifically, marginalized individuals encounter limited park access, insufficient amenity provision, and poor maintenance. To remedy these disparities, we propose a process in which we select candidate park facilities and utilize facility location models to determine the optimal primary parks from both existing and candidate sites.

We note that platforms currently exist to identify the geographical areas where residents lack sufficient access to parks. However, these platforms do not yet …

Investigations Of External Resources And The Impact Of Imaging On Patient Flow In The Emergency Department, Marisa Shehan

All Theses

The problems associated with Emergency Department (ED) crowding are numerous, varied, and complex. Though overcrowded Emergency Departments are frequently attributed to overcrowded hospitals, crowding is also impacted by bottlenecks in patient flow. While discrete-event simulation (DES) is commonly used to model ED flow, external resources are typically excluded from these models due to their complexity and the limited amount of known information for these processes. Instead, external resources such as consults, labs, and imaging are modeled using estimation and/or educated guesswork. In this study, the impact of imaging on patient flow was assessed through data analysis of specific imaging factors, …

Interdiction Models To Disrupt The Operations Of Sex Trafficking And Other Forced Illicit Labor Networks, Michael T. Clark

All Theses

Sex traffickers often force their victims to work in both commercial sex markets and perform other illicit activities (e.g., drug dealing, theft, and fraud). Current literature has failed to address interdiction models that aim to disrupt all components of a sex traffickers’ operation, including these other illicit activities. In this thesis, we present a interdiction problem, and its single-level linear optimization reformulation, to reduce the profit of a human trafficking network concurrently operating in the commercial sex market and other illicit activity markets. Our novel formulation aims to investigate the practical implications of interdiction decisions made to disrupt a human …