مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

With the development of society and economy, civil air transportation has become the most efficient and effective way to transport passengers and cargo. In recent years, China’s civil aviation industry has developed rapidly. Its civil aviation transport turnover and passenger volume ranked the second in the world for several years, which follows the United States. In 2013, the total civil aviation passenger and freight volume reached 353.97 million persons and 5.61 million tons, increasing 103 and 63 times, respectively, compared to the data in 1980. In the same year, the domestic passenger turnover and cargo and mail turnover reached 451 billion person-kilometers and 6.11 billion ton-kilometers, increasing 143 and 121 times, respectively, compared to the data in 1980. Table 1 shows some detailed data on China’s civil aviation transportation.

ansportation. Since the beginning of China’s economic reform in 1978, China’s Civil Aviation Administration (CAAC) has taken several measures to change the way it regulates the civil aviation industry. For example, in 2005, the CAAC permitted private investors to invest in the civil aviation sector, and the number of private airlines has grown rapidly, with new airlines being established for the expanding local markets (Wang et al., 2016). To create a favorable business environment for airline companies, CAAC formulated and promulgated “The Approach on Further Reform of Domestic Air Routes’ License for Flight Operation and Management” in 2010, which puts forward that the management of domestic flight routes should follow the principle of decentralization to improve the airline companies’ operations. In line with the new approach, the license for operating flight on air routes in Beijing, Shanghai (Hongqiao and Pudong airports), and Guangzhou cities should adopt the approval/registration policy, while the license for operating flight on air routes in other airports should follow the registration management policy.1 This means that the CAAC is only responsible for the approval of air routes’ license for operating flight in the four airports, relaxing the access conditions of domestic air routes to give the airlines more autonomy, which is helpful to create a better competition environment for the operation of air routes. Air route is one of the most important elements of civil aviation transport. The operation of airlines is mainly dependent on the structure and layout of air routes. However, the existing studies mainly treated the airlinecompanies or airports, rather than air routes, as decision-making units (DMUs). Since customers, competitors, and operating environments differ among air routes, managerial policies and operational analysis are best discussed from a route-based perspective by treating each route as a “strategic business unit” rather than merely employing a whole-company view (Chiou and Chen, 2006), which help gain insight into operational problems that arise along each route.

The objective of this research is to develop a comprehensive methodology to investigate the efficiency of air routes from a managerial perspective. Formulating multi-production processes is appropriate because the air routes use the operating expense and infrastructure to provide passenger transport service and freight shipment. Based on the functional analysis of the air routes, after establishing an index system in line with China’s civil air operational status, two network DEA models are proposed to evaluate the performance of a group of air routes in China, where the constraints of the intermediate measure is distinguished, and the system efficiency obtained using the two network DEA models can be decomposed into a weighted average of the sub-functional ef- ficiencies. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. The second section briefly reviews the related literature. Section 3 proposes two network DEA models to study China’s air route effi- ciency. Section 4 presents the data and results. Section 5 concludes.