DEA Models for the Efficiency Evaluation of System Composed of Parallel Subsystems

Abstract

The perspective of internal structure of the decision making units (DMUs) was considered as the “black box” when employing data envelopment analysis (DEA) models. However, in the actual world there are always some DMUs that are composed of several sub-units or subsystems, each utilizes the same inputs to generate same outputs. Numerous instances can be listed, such as a firm with a few of plants. In this paper we present models that evaluated the efficiency of DMU which is comprised of same several parallel subsystems, the foremost contribution of our work is that we take the different importance of the subsystems into account in the model, which can be obviously distinguished to the existing DEA model. Secondly, since the alternative optimal multipliers may emerge in the model, the efficiency of each subsystem may be non-unique and we simultaneously develop models of efficiency decomposition for each subsystem. At last a case of technological innovation activities of each province in China is used as an example to state the models