A fuzzy mathematical programming approach to the assessment of efficiency with DEA models

In many real applications, the data of production processes cannot be precisely measured. This is particularly worrying when assessing efficiency with frontier-type models, such as data envelopment analysis (DEA) models, since they are very sensitive to possible data errors. For this reason, the possibility of having available a methodology that allows the analyst to deal with imprecise data becomes an issue of great interest in these contexts. To that end, we develop some fuzzy versions of the classical DEA models (in particular, the BCC model) by using some ranking methods based on the comparison of a-cuts. The resulting auxiliary crisp problems can be solved by the usual DEA software. We show, in a numerical example, how our models become specially useful for detecting sensitive decision-making units. Our approaches can be seen as an extension of the DEA methodology that provides users and practitioners with models which represent some real life processes more appropriately. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.