A robust optimization approach for imprecise data envelopment analysis

  • Authors:

  • Amir H. Shokouhi;Adel Hatami-Marbini;Madjid Tavana;Saber Saati

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Industrial Engineering, Khajeh Nasir Toosi University, Tehran, Iran;Louvain School of Management, Center of Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE), Universite Catholique de Louvain, 34 Voie du Roman Pays, B-1348 Louvain-le-Neuve, Belgium;Management Department, Lindback Distinguished Chair of Information Systems, La Salle University, Philadelphia, PA 19141, USA;Department of Mathematics, Tehran-North Branch, Islamic Azad University, P.O. Box 19585-936, Tehran, Iran

  • Venue:
  • Computers and Industrial Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Crisp input and output data are fundamentally indispensable in traditional data envelopment analysis (DEA). However, the input and output data in real-world problems are often imprecise or ambiguous. Some researchers have proposed interval DEA (IDEA) and fuzzy DEA (FDEA) to deal with imprecise and ambiguous data in DEA. Nevertheless, many real-life problems use linguistic data that cannot be used as interval data and a large number of input variables in fuzzy logic could result in a significant number of rules that are needed to specify a dynamic model. In this paper, we propose an adaptation of the standard DEA under conditions of uncertainty. The proposed approach is based on a robust optimization model in which the input and output parameters are constrained to be within an uncertainty set with additional constraints based on the worst case solution with respect to the uncertainty set. Our robust DEA (RDEA) model seeks to maximize efficiency (similar to standard DEA) but under the assumption of a worst case efficiency defied by the uncertainty set and it's supporting constraint. A Monte-Carlo simulation is used to compute the conformity of the rankings in the RDEA model. The contribution of this paper is fourfold: (1) we consider ambiguous, uncertain and imprecise input and output data in DEA; (2) we address the gap in the imprecise DEA literature for problems not suitable or difficult to model with interval or fuzzy representations; (3) we propose a robust optimization model in which the input and output parameters are constrained to be within an uncertainty set with additional constraints based on the worst case solution with respect to the uncertainty set; and (4) we use Monte-Carlo simulation to specify a range of Gamma in which the rankings of the DMUs occur with high probability.