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A Novel Ratio-Based Parallel DEA Approach for Evaluating the Energy and Environmental Performance of Chinese Transportation Sectors

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Abstract

As a high-energy-consumption and high-CO2-emission industry in China, the transportation sector has been under increasing pressure to improve its performance. This paper develops a novel parallel DEA approach to measure Chinese transportation sector’s energy and environmental performance (EEP) over all possible weights, which is to avoid the risk of using the extreme or the most favorable weights in performance evaluation. In our method, the transportation sector is consisted of two parallel subsystems (passenger transportation and freight transportation) with shared inputs and undesirable shared outputs. All possible weights are considered in the EEP evaluation, then the EEP of a transportation sector is represented by a ranking interval. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to the transportation sectors in 30 Chinese provinces. Results show that the best and the worst ranking of most provinces vary greatly. Besides, the EEP of most provinces is hard to dominate others strictly, but the general tendency is the EEP of eastern provinces better than western provinces. Furthermore, the EEP difference of some adjacent provinces with similar features is distinct. These findings are not all the same as previous studies, which verifies the necessity of considering all possible weights in performance evaluation. Therefore, our method provides a new point of view in performance evaluation and can give more robust results for decision makers.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviews for their help to improve the quality of the paper. This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 71801075, 71701060, 71904186, 71871081 and 71828101,National Social Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 18ZDA064 and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant Nos. JZ2018HGBZ0174 and JS2017HGXJ0028.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, 230009, China

    Xiyang Lei & Xuefei Zhang

  2. Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Lin Li

  3. School of Economics, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, 230009, China

    Qianzhi Dai

  4. Center for Industrial Information and Economic Research, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, 230009, China

    Qianzhi Dai

  5. College of Economics, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518061, China

    Yelin Fu

Authors
  1. Xiyang Lei
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  2. Lin Li
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  3. Xuefei Zhang
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  4. Qianzhi Dai
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  5. Yelin Fu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qianzhi Dai.

Additional information

Xiyang Lei is currently working as a lecturer at School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Anhui Province, China. She received her bachelor degree from the College of Economics & Management at Northwest A&F University, China, in 2011. She received her PhD degree in management science and engineering from the School of Management at University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China. Her research interest is making performance evaluation and making decision on resource allocation prioritization.

Lin Li received her PhD degree in Beihang University, China. She received her Master degree from Beijing University of Technology and Bachelor degree from Liaocheng University. Her main research interests focus on data analysis, performance evaluation, especially journal evaluation.

Xuefei Zhang has been studying for her bachelor degree in management since 2016 at the School of Management, Hefei University of Technology, Anhui Province, China. Her major is accounting and her major subjects are financial accounting, management accounting and financial analysis.

Qianzhi Dai is currently working as an associate professor at School of Economics, HefeiUniversity of Technology, Anhui Province, China. He received his Ph.D. degree from University of Science and Technology of China in 2014 and Bachelor degree from Anhui University in 2008. His research interests focus on performance evaluation and resource allocation problems in energy and environmental economics.

Yelin Fu is currently working at Shenzhen University. He received his Ph.D. degree from University of Science and Technology of China and City University of Hong Kong. His research interests focus on MCDM, robust optimization and supply chain management.

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Lei, X., Li, L., Zhang, X. et al. A Novel Ratio-Based Parallel DEA Approach for Evaluating the Energy and Environmental Performance of Chinese Transportation Sectors. J. Syst. Sci. Syst. Eng. 28, 621–635 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11518-019-5416-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11518-019-5416-x

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