Efficiency Evaluation of Railway Freight Stations by Using DEA Approach

Subject Areas : Data Envelopment Analysis

Davoud  Haghighi ¹ (Department of Railway Transportation Planning, Iran Railway Organization, Isfahan, Iran)
رضا  بابازاده ² (Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Urmia University, Urmia, West Azerbaijan Province, Iran)

Received: 2020-11-02 Accepted : 2021-02-21 Published : 2020-12-01

Keywords: Data envelopment analysis, Technical efficiency, Robust regression, Railway freight stations,

Abstract :

Railway freight stations roles as points in which traffic processes can be merged and diverged are of paramount importance. Numerous activities such as train formation, alighting and interchanging, technical checks are also done at these points. Due to the great importance of using railway infrastructures and rolling stocks facilities efficiently, the efficiency studies in this area are considered as a demanding task more than ever. Therefore, we implement a methodology based on data envelopment analysis to address this issue. The suggested methodology in this research can be used for measuring the efficiency of railway freight stations and ranking them by using DEA and Anderson & Peterson methods. This methodology can be used for analyzing the relative ‘technical efficiency’ of railway freight stations to manage train stops regarding the current station capacity. We applied this model in a case study of the 12 busiest train stations in Isfahan railway to measure and rank their efficiency and assess the effect of traffic type on the results by using robust regression.