Internal resource mobility of a railway administration: A three-phase centralized data envelopment analysis

Railway transportation in Taiwan is not only one of the important means of transportation in the populous western corridor, but also a main mode of transportation in the eastern corridor. However, due to the poor operating condition of its railways, the Taiwan Railway Administration has been running at a loss. To reduce losses and improve performance, the operators of railways in Taiwan should more effectively allocate internal resources between train stations. Since the train stations are managed by the centralized administration, the Taiwan Railway Administration pursues overall performance. Hence, this paper constructs resource allocation methods based on centralized data envelopment analysis, and further proposes a three-phase method to un-derstand the situation involving increased or decreased resources for each train station, and determines the internal resource mobility between train stations. By building resource allocation models, this paper can provide the railway operators with extensive information to effectively reallocate resources.