A Heuristic Method on Extended Two-Stage Network Structures

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) as a non–parametric method is used to measure relative performance of organizational units. The aim of this paper is to develop a new model to evaluate the efficiency of a general two-stage network structures proposed by Li et al. (2012) for measuring the performance of Decision Making Units (DMUs). In addition, this paper expands the work of Li et al. (2012) and improves the heuristic search procedure to estimate the optimal solutions of non-linear centralized models. In order to evaluate the proposed model of this study, it has been applied to a case of regional Research and Development (R&D) system related to 30 provincial level regions in China. The experimental results compared with method developed by Li et al. (2012) show that the proposed method is efficient and has much lower computational complexity.