Data Envelopment Analysis

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a method for measuring the efficiency of organizations, so-called Decision Making Units (DMU). The DEA allows a comparison of profit and non-profit organizations based on a variety of criteria.

For that purpose, a DMU’s transformation process or production process is characterized by its inputs and outputs. The intention of DEA is the aggregation of such inputs and outputs towards a top key figure. A major advantage of the DEA is based on the fact that the aggregation does not require a predetermination of a weighting scheme, but rather this scheme is the result of the optimization.

The research activities of DEA contain among other things the following topics:

• Meta-Models of DEA
• Online Tool to measure efficiency
• Measuring of cross-efficiency and returns to scale

One of our projects, for example, deals with the measurement of efficiency and returns to scale of airports. Especially in this field, we have non-monetary inputs and outputs, for example service quality and airport security.

Essential research questions in the use case „Efficiency Analysis of airports” are:

• How can airport processes be evaluated and how can they finally be represented comprehensively?
• How can we illustrate potentials for efficiency improvements in order to support the decision-makers accurately?