Marginal Trade-offs for Resilient Transportation Using Data Envelopment Analysis Usman Akbar
The University of Lahore, Defence Road, Lahore, Pakistan.
*usman.akbar[at]lbs.uol.edu.pk
Abstract
Successful economic corridors depend largely on high competitiveness in road operations, making overall satisfaction the most important factor. At present, sustainable development goals have become the focus of attention of countries around the world, among which the goal of zero emission is the most persistent [1]. While many academic results make possible the greatest gains related to overall satisfaction, ongoing competition pushes the transportation industry to perform more operations, generating more carbon than our ecosystems can recycle, contributing to global warming. This impact on global ecosystems has prompted researchers to identify any possible micromanagement techniques that could reduce carbon emissions while maintaining total satisfaction in traffic to maintain a competitive advantage in road trade services. The synergy between transportation energy efficiency and total satisfaction are often termed as sustainable trade-offs or marginal trade-offs.
Previous researchers have calculated efficiencies and proposed solutions to this global challenge in various ways, but quantitative research to support decision-making and policy design still lags the equilibrium approach, i.e., to make such a change in the input or output factors that the transport efficiency remains intact with total satisfaction and yet the considerable reduction in an undesirable output can be made. Furthermore, this interrupts the fundamental definition of trade-off that the researchers use-for example, gains at the expense of other variable defects. Deng and John [2] explore existing trade-offs to increase the efficiency of sustainable agricultural sector development. They adopted production and urbanization and brought about technological changes in agriculture. On the other hand, a recent new study by Bazyli and Martha [3] explore the trade-offs between social efficiency, economics, and the environment. They investigate the policy^s impact on sustainable European agriculture and find that the long-term impact of carbon emissions on efficiency, although social sustainability may be negatively affected by reduced productivity due to borders implementation of carbon schemes. Usman et al. [4] worked on finding the marginal efficiency by bringing higher efficiency to the DMU at the efficient frontier, which was also worked on by Akbar et al., Ji et al., Laso et al., Mirzaei et al. [5]- [8].
The current study offers two unique solutions to the current challenges of eco-efficiency without avoiding the total satisfaction of highway road transport. First, the ecological asset as well as ecological footprints should both be considered as a function because both are interrelated. Second, the marginal trade-off function is not necessarily be viewed as a trade-off function, but rather as an optimal efficiency function. The analysis used in the study is based on energy efficiency variables (including number of industrial vehicles registered, and fuel consumption as an input, and CO2 emissions as an undesirable output) and total satisfaction variables (including infrastructure development index, reliability based on the alternatives available for customers, both as an input variable. Whereas safety - as a metrics related to accidental rate and natural disaster resilience - and tons kilometres as desirable output variables). First, the data is processed to ensure consistency and comparability including missing values and normalising the variables. The slack based measurement (SBM) from the prior study of Ji et al. [5], is adopted along with the marginal trade-off method to purposefully handle the non-discretionary factors, i.e., safety, to find the current efficiency and the DMUs that are on the efficient frontier boundary [9], [10]. Then the model for trade-off balances is employed from the study by Mirzeai et al [7] to perform trade-offs between desirable and undesirable outputs without a change in inputs (considering them an uninterrupted resource). Many experiments are performed to find the best margins which can bring more indirect efficiency to the DMU at the efficient frontier. The data from 10 economic corridors is considered to test the results. The optimal interval of +0.65, −-0.54 is finally determined as an interval where the resource inputs do not decline. Moreover, +0.5 increase on the capacity to reduces the ecological footprint to an extent to gain the optimal efficiency point. The interesting fact of these findings is that the energy efficiency and total satisfaction of transportation are maintained, while enabling policymakers to design policy that help maintain acceptable levels of highway productivity.
