Research Projects

The Laboratory for Location Science conducts scholarly research about challenging problems that are fundamentally spatial in nature. The Laboratory pursues grant and contract support from federal, state, and local agencies as well as non-profit corporations and for-profit enterprises. Summaries of some of the Laboratory's active projects appear below.

Description: The revolution in autonomous logistics is an anticipated transformation in high-efficiency, high-speed, and highly integrated transportation and supply-chain management systems that will rely on the deployment of unmanned and self-driving air, ground, and sea platforms. It will also rely on algorithms that enhance agent autonomy and on computational approaches to combinatorially complex location and allocation decisions. This project explores a series of interrelated logistical problems in the unmanned/autonomous context in order to anticipate and develop mitigation strategies for the challenges they represent.

Awarded: 2016

Duration: 5/1/2016 – 4/30/2018

PI: Kevin M. Curtin, Ph.D.

Co-PI: Alec D. Barker, Ph.D.

Funded amount: $737,609

Funding agency: U.S. Navy Office of Naval Research

Related publications and presentations:

Description:

This award will promote progress in scientific understanding of illicit supply networks, and provide insights into how processes designed to disrupt Central American cocaine trafficking networks influence citizen security in the region and in the U.S. Counterdrug interdiction efforts are designed primarily to seize or disrupt cocaine shipments between South American source zones and U.S. markets, and remain a core commitment of U.S. ‘supply side’ drug policy and national security strategy. However, almost 50 years of interdiction activities have unintentionally spread and/or fragmented existing trafficking routes into new and more numerous locations, resulting in a drug trafficking space that has grown from 2 to 7 million mi2 between 1996 and 2017. This research builds an interdisciplinary understanding of the structure and function of narco-trafficking networks and their co-evolution with interdiction efforts to investigate how different interdiction approaches might impact traffickers’ spatial, organizational, and economic behavior. This research establishes new intellectual bridges between operations engineering, geographic, and criminological perspectives, leading to more comprehensive and spatially detailed insights that can inform drug policy reforms. This award supports outreach activities to increase public understanding about the current state of drug trafficking in Central America as a consequence of U.S. drug policy. The accompanying education plan will push the boundaries of conventional graduate education to meet the emerging needs of illicit support network research to inform policy.

This research will investigate spatial adaptive behaviors of narco-trafficking networks in response to various interdiction strategies within the cocaine transit zone of Central America and associated maritime areas. This will be accomplished by developing integrated agent-based and interdiction optimization models to assess how the spatial and structural relationships of cocaine flows and prices along trafficking routes change in response to alternative interdiction strategies. The proposed research represents a new paradigm in which trafficker-interdiction interactions are conceived of as a complex adaptive system and modeled as a co-evolutionary phenomenon. The integrated models will test hypotheses about the factors that explain the location and extent of emerging trafficking nodes in an expanding transit zone. The models will be parameterized with a novel application of data from the Consolidated Counterdrug Database (CCDB). Using a criminological lens, we will map the vulnerability of spaces in the so-called “transit zone” to enable a holistic analysis of the environmental and operational aspects of locations of new narco-trafficking activity.

Awarded: 09/01/2018

Duration: 09/01/2018 – 08/31/2020

PI: Nicholas R. Magliocca, Ph.D.

Co-PI: Kevin M. Curtin, Ph.D.

Co-PI: Diana Dolliver, Ph.D.

Co-PI: Kendra McSweeney, Ph.D.

Funded amount: $290,229

Funding agency: National Science Foundation

Related publications and presentations:

Innovative Research about Spatial Thinking by Human Groups

The Laboratory for Location Science in partnership with the University of California - Santa Barbara is engaged in an effort to accelerate research advances in collective spatial cognition. We seek to engage an international and multi-disciplinary community of scholars, who can collaborate to provide a foundation for knowledge discovery regarding how groups of people learn about space, and act on the spatial knowledge they collectively gain. Please see the Collective Spatial Cognition page for more details.

Awarded: 2018

Duration: Current

PI: Kevin M. Curtin, Ph.D.

Co-PI: Daniel R. Montello, Ph.D.

Funded amount: $296,540

Funding agency: U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences

Description: This project examines the spatial characteristics of team activities, especially the movements and communications of human groups trying to accomplish specific organizational tasks. It uses computer simulation, interactive computer games, customized smartphones, andteams of human subjects in games like hide-and-seek. The project is collecting information and building concepts to help us understand why, how, and when individuals, teams, and systems of teams make choices about their locations.

Phase I

Awarded: 2013

Duration: 11/1/13 – 09/29/15

PI: Kevin M. Curtin, Ph.D.

Co-PI: Richard M. Medina, Ph.D.

Co-Investigator:Alec D. Barker, Ph.D.

Funded amount: $337,566

Funding agency: U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences

Phase II

Awarded: 2015

Duration: 09/29/15 - 11/29/2016

PI: Kevin M. Curtin, Ph.D.

Co-PI:Alec D. Barker, Ph.D.

Graduate Research Assistants: Rebecca M. Rice, John Solly

Funded amount: $189,744 (Total $527,311)

Funding agency: U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences

Related publications and presentations:

Description: Kevin M. Curtin, PhD acts as the University Partner for Phase II of the Volunteer Workforce Solutions (VWS) Project, under the auspices of the Connecticut Fire Chiefs Association (CFCA) and their partner the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC). Dr. Curtin meets the evaluation and analytical needs of CFCA and IAFC in the hope of improving volunteer firefighter recruitment and retention.

Awarded: 2014

Duration: 11/1/14 - 7/1/16

PI: Kevin M. Curtin, Ph.D.

Graduate Research Assistant: Rebecca Hill

Funded amount: $97,525

Funding agency: Federal Emergency Management Agency and the International Association of Fire Chiefs

Related publications and presentations:

FSTAR - Firefighter Safety Through Advanced Research

Description: Kevin M. Curtin, PhD acts as the University Partner for FSTAR project

Awarded: 2015

Duration: 12/9/15 - 4/22/16

PI: Kevin M. Curtin, Ph.D.

Graduate Research Assistants: Jasmin Khangura and Rebecca Hill

Undergraduate Research Assistant: Kelsey Ciarrocca

Funded amount: $37,809

Funding agency: Federal Emergency Management Agency and the International Association of Fire Chiefs

Related publications and presentations: