Determining the ideal pattern of units by simultaneously examining the lowest cost, highest revenue and closest distance

Data envelopment analysis (DEA ) is a technique to evaluate the relative performance of a set of decision - making units ( DMUs ) . Corresponding to each inefficient DMU , an efficient benchmark on efficient frontier is determined and inefficient DMUs are projected to this benchmark by increasing their outputs and decreasing inputs . In this paper , a DEA - based procedure is proposed to determine an ideal benchmark to each inefficient unit . Our proposed benchmark dominates the unit under evaluation and it is a convex combination of projection points obtained from different aspects : cost, revenue efficiencies and the closest distance . A n important point is that although the obtained benchmark is not necessarily an efficient point, however , it dominates the unit under consideration . At the end of the paper , the proposed model would be implemented on a simple numerical example .