Principal speaker
Dr Barbara Yen
New Models for Evaluating Transport Service Efficiency
This presentation will explore three different types of data envelopment analysis (DEA) models that remedy two research gaps in the transportation industry. The first gap is a lack of useful route performance evaluation metrics; the second is vagueness in the measurement of key variables. A series of innovations are proposed to improve existing methods. The presentation first looks at transport operators/companies and all their routes combined to evaluate aggregate performance. Then, individual routes are dis-aggregated and evaluated. Using a ranking order approach, we show that the two approaches are consistent. These approaches are operationalised in an empirical study of intercity bus transport companies in Taiwan. The case study demonstrates the superiority of the proposed models in identifying less efficient routes and companies, in a manner that is more robust than using standard linear regression models.
Dr Barbara Yen is an Academic Strategic Transport Research Alliance (ASTRA) Research Fellow at the Urban Research Program, Nathan Campus. Her work is mostly in the fields of transport economics, travel behaviour and transport policy.