Evaluating the Efficiency of Iranian Regional Railways

Railway transportation plays an important role in the economic development of Iran. National Iranian Railways includes fifteen regional railways which operate independently, but under the supervision of National Iranian Railways Company. Evaluating the efficiency of regional railways is an important issue in Iran and is one of the bases for budget and resource allocation for further developments of regional railways. Furthermore, the efficiency of national railway transportation is highly affected by the total performance of regional railways. In this paper a DEA model and an aggregated ranking technique is applied to rank the efficiency of regional railways in four different scenarios. The results show that most regional railways in Iran operate inefficiently and needs improvement actions. Therefore, the efficient regional railways in this paper are recommended as a benchmark for performance improvement of inefficient railways.