An Overview of the Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis Research and Its Successful Applications

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a prominent technique to make decisions and improve alternatives based on non-parameter modeling and ratio calculation. However, an obvious difficulty to use this method is how to obtain accurate input and output data in the real application. To address this issue, the fuzzy DEAs (FDEAs) are proposed which have been successfully applied in many real fields. The FDEAs hold two aforementioned advantages; meanwhile, it can conveniently present uncertain evaluation information. Therefore, the FDEAs have received much attention from researchers. To summarize the current status, development trends, and further studies of the FDEA research, this paper investigates the related publications from two perspectives of description analysis and literature review, which includes the following details: (1) the literature retrospective analysis of the FDEA with bibliometric technique. Based on it, the publication overview, the cluster network, the emerging trend, and the burst detection are demonstrated in detail. (2) The method review of the basic FDEAs and two kinds of extended FDEAs. These FDEAs are proposed by introducing different fuzzy inputs and outputs, developing different theoretical DEAs, and integrating different mathematical models, respectively. (3) The application review of the FDEAs in some real-life situations. The obtained results provide some clues for researchers who are interested in the FDEA research to do further investigations on theory development and practical applications.