Performance evaluation for network systems

Network systems are composed of a set of processes operating interdependently. In evaluating the performance of the whole system, the operations of the component processes must be taken into consideration. Several models have been developed in the literature, of which, the slacks-based measure (SBM) approach has attracted much attention for its ability to provide suitable efficiency measures. This paper develops a general SBM model for network systems, and is able to decompose the system efficiency into a weighted average of the efficiencies of the processes. An example shows that the network model has stronger discriminating power than the conventional one. The decomposition of the system efficiency helps identify key factors to improve the performance of a unit.