Title: Efficiency measurement in fuzzy additive data envelopment analysis

Authors: Adel Hatami-Marbini; Madjid Tavana; Ali Emrouznejad; Saber Saati

Addresses: Louvain School of Management, Center of Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE), Universite Catholique de Louvain, 34 Voie du Roman Pays, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium ' Management Information Systems, Lindback Distinguished Chair of Information Systems, La Salle University, Philadelphia, PA 19141, USA ' Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham, UK ' Department of Mathematics, Tehran-North Branch, Islamic Azad University, P.O. Box 19585-936, Tehran, Iran

Abstract: Performance evaluation in conventional data envelopment analysis (DEA) requires crisp numerical values. However, the observed values of the input and output data in real-world problems are often imprecise or vague. These imprecise and vague data can be represented by linguistic terms characterised by fuzzy numbers in DEA to reflect the decision-makers’ intuition and subjective judgements. This paper extends the conventional DEA models to a fuzzy framework by proposing a new fuzzy additive DEA model for evaluating the efficiency of a set of decision-making units (DMUs) with fuzzy inputs and outputs. The contribution of this paper is threefold: (1) we consider ambiguous, uncertain and imprecise input and output data in DEA, (2) we propose a new fuzzy additive DEA model derived from the ?-level approach and (3) we demonstrate the practical aspects of our model with two numerical examples and show its comparability with five different fuzzy DEA methods in the literature.

Keywords: fuzzy additive DEA; data envelopment analysis; fuzzy sets theory; DMUs; decision making units; fuzzy additive models; performance evaluation; efficiency measurement; ambiguous data; imprecise data; uncertain data; fuzzy logic.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2012.044041

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2012 Vol.10 No.1, pp.1 - 20

Published online: 20 Dec 2014 *

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