Developing An Efficiency Based Target Setting Model For K-Stage Serial Tructures

Data envelopment analysis as an effective approach to evaluate the relative efficiency of decision- making units, recently applied for developing production plans in terms of resource allocation and target setting in many production and operation systems. most of these systems are of network struc- tures where the outputs from a given stage are intermediate measures which form the inputs for the next stage. this paper proposes a new k-stage dea based multi objective linear programming model for target setting in the serial network structures, considering undesirable outputs. since the proposed model takes the size of under evaluation units into account when developing the inputs/outputs ar- rangements, the new idea ensures the possibility of the results. an empirical example of a production system is used to illustrate the applicability of the proposed model. the results show that based on the new plan, all of the eciency scores are improved.