congestion-based benchmarking and accessing sustainability in network dea, case study: nine iranian tomato paste supply chains.

Nowadays, the role of sustainable development factors in performance evaluation of an organization is unavoidable. also during past decades sustainability has received more attention in making a scientific management and investment scheme. in addition, data envelopment analysis is a non-parametric mathematical technique to evaluate performance of a set of decision making units which has used extensively. in this paper, at first, a three-stage dmu has assumed and its efficiency score is calculated via a network dea model. the concept of congestion is utilized to find a benchmark for evaluating dmu. for this aim, the congestion has investigated in the stages which follow variable return to scale technology. then, by eliminating congestion, the adjustment all intermediate products and initial inputs are applied by utilizing an inverse dea model without changing the overall efficiency. besides, a network idea model is presented regarding the efficiency improvement of dmu after omitting congestion. finally, by considering the great interest role of sustainable development and sustainability assessment to both academia and practitioners in the past decades, a case study, based on sustainable development factors, demonstrates the efficiency of our proposed model. the proposed ideas are used in nine iranian supply chains that produce tomato paste.