Performance analysis in production processes in the presence of fixed-sum outputs

Performance measurement in the presence of fixed-sum outputs in data envelopment analysis (DEA) is an interesting and most frequently studied subject in the field of operations research. Different definitions of relative efficiency in the presence of fixed-sum outputs have been proposed in the literature of data envelopment analysis and in all of the existing definitions a common equilibrium efficient frontier is given. We will show that determining a single equilibrium efficient frontier may leads to a large trade-off between the decision making units and this may be impossible in real cases. In this paper, we propose a context-based data envelopment analysis approach to evaluate the relative performance of the decision making units when fixed-sum outputs are exist in production process. The approach proposed in this paper uses the context based data envelopment analysis to determine an efficiency score to each DMU. To illustrate the real applicability of the proposed approach, a real case on 21 OCED countries is given.