Performance Analysis of China Ethylene Plants by Measuring Malmquist Production Efficiency Based on an Improved Data Envelopment Analysis Cross-Model

Abstract

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has been widely used for efficiency evaluation of industrial plants. A conventional DEA model may easily lead to the situation where more than one-third of efficiency values are set to 1, so it is hard to analyze the pros and cons of the multi-decision-making units. The DEA cross-model can distinguish the pros and cons of the effective decision-making units, but it is unable to indicate the improvement direction of the ineffective decision-making units. This paper proposes an efficiency analysis method based on an improved DEA cross-model, which can get higher efficiency discrimination in identifying the efficiency state of the decision-making units compared with the conventional DEA model. The improved DEA cross-model avoids the impacts of unreasonable weight allocation of input and output indices. Meanwhile, self-evaluation of the improved DEA cross-model with the slack variables can find the improvement direction of the ineffective decision-making units. Also, the Malmqu...