A Novel Data Envelopment Analysis Framework for Performance Evaluation of European Road Transport Systems

Abstract

The role of transportation is becoming increasingly important in the world economy, and road transport in particular plays a very important role in all types of transportation. For this reason, it is extremely important to monitor its performance regularly. Very often, this is done using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) performance evaluation models, and consequently, there are numerous articles in the literature on DEA evaluation of road transport systems. In this study, we first summarise these articles and classify them according to different characteristics (environmental, safety, economic, energy). Finally, we use them as a basis for developing a novel DEA framework, which is used for the evaluation of the efficiency and ranking of road transport systems that also takes into account undesirable outputs, i.e. environmental and safety outputs. As a case study, we evaluate 28 European countries from technical, safety and environmental aspects. The CCR and SBM models are used to evaluate the efficiency of these countries for the last two years of published data. The results show that Denmark ranks first and Cyprus last for both years. It was also found that safety efficiency is generally rated lower than other criteria. Finally, the results and reasons for the efficiency and inefficiency of specific decision-making units, i.e. countries, are discussed.