A Novel Method for Evaluating Dredging Productivity Using a Data Envelopment Analysis-Based Technique

The increase in the frequency of extreme weather has caused the impact of natural disasters to become more extensive. Natural disasters reduce the effective storage capacity of reservoirs and affect their normal function. Reservoir dredging is a key issue in the management of water resources and is a complicated multiple-attribute decision-making (MADM) problem. The traditional assessment of dredging productivity has been performed using a labor productivity method to evaluate the related issues of dredging performance. However, the traditional labor productivity method only deals with the single-input/single-output evaluation factor for various forms of productivity. The traditional labor productivity method cannot address complicated MADM problems in the assessment of dredging productivity. To resolve the limitations of the traditional labor productivity method, this paper extended data envelopment analysis (DEA) and proposed a novel method for evaluating dredging productivity. The proposed method can handle various combinations of evaluation factors (single-input, multi-input, single-output, and multioutput). Three real cases of reservoir dredging are applied to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The simulation results show that the proposed method can be applied generally and correctly assesses the related issues of dredging performance.