A SLACKS-BASED MEASURE OF EFFICIENCY FOR PARALLEL AND SERIES PRODUCTION SYSTEMS

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a mathematical approach for evaluating the e ciency of decision making units (DMUs) that convert multiple inputs into multiple outputs. In many cases, production systems may have internal or network structures, such as series and parallel structures, which are composed of several processes interacting with each other. In the last two decades, several authors have proposed DEA models which usually utilize the radial measure to calculate the e ciency of the DMUs with internal structure. In this paper, we rst introduce a non-radial DEA model in the slacks-based measure (SBM) framework for evaluating the overall e ciency of parallel production systems by considering the parallel relationship between sub-processes. We will, then extend the methodology to series production systems. A numerical experiment is used to demonstrate and compare the results with obtained using new methods and show the application of the proposed approach.