An improvement approach based on DEA-game theory for comparison of operational and spatial efficiencies in urban transportation systems

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a well-known methodology to measure relative efficiencies of transportation systems. In the real world, it is necessary to determine how to combine two separated efficiency measures in a unified structure. The conventional Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) cannot be applied for these situations. Also, the efficiency scores may not be meaningful, especially when the number of Decision Making Units (DMUs) is insufficient. This study combines DEA and Nash bargaining game as a cooperative game theory approach to evaluate the performance of transportation systems by a large scale of measures. The proposed approach regardless of the number of units discriminates among the units more effectively. Besides, these measures may be classified in different categories and DMUs are evaluated simultaneous with different categories in the competitive environment. In this paper, we define two categories of inputs (operational and spatial) to measure performance of transportation systems. Furthermore, managers determine that each bus line in which category has better performance and in which lines is inefficient. The case study of bus lines evaluation is presented to show the abilities of the proposed approach.