Selecting the best flexible manufacturing system supplier in the presence of dual-role factors: A decision model based on the Worst Practice Frontier DEA and Common Set of Weights

Technology selection, as a multi criteria decision making problem, is known as a difficult task for managers and decision makers (DMs). Among the methods used in the history of technology selection, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), as a multiple criteria decision making tool, has been frequently used. In traditional use of DEA for technology selection, considering dual-role factors whose classification as input or output is in doubt, has been presented. However the models used in the literature which consider dual-role factors are based on the Best Practice Frontier (BPF) models. These models use the best possible weights for the inputs and outputs of the particular Decision Making Units (DMUs) to calculate the efficiency score of them. The present paper discusses the disadvantages of using BPF-DEA in the selection of technologies. In addition, the original Worst Practice Frontier (WPF) DEA is developed to consider dual-role factors. Moreover, to derive a complete ranking among all the DMUs and avoid unrealistic weighting scheme in the original WPF-DEA, a solution based on the Common Set of Weights (CSW) has been proposed. A numerical example demonstrates the application of the proposed method. © IDOSI Publications, 2012.