Hamid Reza Ahadi - Assistant Professor, School of Railway Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran
Zahra Saghian - Graduate Student, School of Railway Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology,Tehran, Iran

Evaluation of railway transportation operational efficiency is one of the most important issues of railway transportation industry. National Iranian Railway includes 15 operational regions which operate under the supervision of Iranian Railway headquarter. In this paper, we have applied Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique to measure the efficiency of these 15 railway regions (DMUs) both in Variable and Constant Return to Scale. To achieve this goal we have applied and compared several models with different outputs. We have also ranked the efficient railway regions by applying heuristic ranking techniques to find out the most efficient model. To have more accurate results, we have aggregated the results of ranking techniques by applying Copeland approach as a voting rule. The results show that the Hormozgan railway region in Iran has the highest operational efficiency among all regions both in VRS and CRS.

Iranian Railways, Efficiency Evaluation, Data Envelopment Analysis, Ranking