Project planning with secrecy, monitoring, and interdiction

Both in production and in service sectors, a large number of
organizations subdivide work into projects, and this within a wide
variety of areas, such as R&D, construction, software development,
process re-engineering, and maintenance operations. Project
management (PM) deals with the selection of projects as well as with
their operation, planning, and control. Within the rich literature on
PM, only a handful of articles so far have looked into the competitive
use of information related to secrecy, monitoring, and interdiction.
With the increasing availability of data as well as tools to analyze
these data, however, the issue of identifying, protecting, and acting
upon key information is, today more than ever, fundamental for
success.
Our goal is to model the generic aspects underlying secrecy,
monitoring, and interdiction in PM, and to develop novel algorithms to
produce optimal strategies for those models. Our work has potential
applications in any PM setting where secrecy plays a role, ranging
from managing secrecy during new product development to
interdicting the manufacturing of a first batch of nuclear weapons by
a rogue state, and from monitoring whether a terrorist plot is ongoing
to intercepting the supply of a major batch of illicit drugs. Our
analysis will mainly use discrete optimization methods from the field
of operations research.