A research on network structure of DEA models and its application on China's airport

The production process may have internal or network structure, for example, a company may have several production lines which use different inputs to produce the outputs, and there may be connection activities (or intermediate products) among the production lines. The traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA) models cannot be directly employed to measure the performance of this kind of decision making unit (DMU) as they treat the production system as a whole, disregarding the internal production process when calculating the efficiency. Depending on the characteristics of the DMU's inputs and outputs, this paper first classifies the network structure of DEA models. Then, a network DEA model is proposed to evaluate the airport's efficiency, and 20 major airports' system efficiencies, ground service efficiencies, passenger transport efficiencies, and freight transport efficiencies are analyzed systematically.