Performance evaluation of general network production processes with undesirable outputs: A DEA approach

Department of Mathematics, Islamic Azad University, Karaj Branch, Karaj, Iran.

^∗ Corresponding author: rkmatin@kiau.ac.ir

Received: 30 March 2016
Accepted: 19 March 2017

Abstract

Performance evaluation of production systems with network structure has been widely studied in recent data envelopment analysis (DEA) literature. Production systems in which outputs of some stages are consumed as the inputs of some other stages in producing final outputs. In real world applications, production processes are often complex and may produce not only desirable but also undesirable intermediate or final outputs. In this paper modelling a general network DEA is considered in the presence of undesirable outputs. A weak disposable production set consistent with undesirable outputs is introduced and some network DEA models are also proposed for performance evaluation of the production units. The proposed method is illustrated by some numerical example, including an empirical application.