Corporate real estate analysis: evaluating telecom branch efficiency in Greece

This paper proposes productivity analysis for evaluating the relative efficiency in corporate real estate usage across decision-making units. Using data from the Greek Telecommunications Organization (GTO), we measure the productivity of 127 braches using the number of employees and the total area covered per building as inputs and the number of telephony access lines as outputs. We apply three non-parametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) models assuming: constant returns to scale (CRS), variable returns to scale (VRS) and slacks-based measures (SBM), respectively. We discuss how the proposed approach can provide real estate managers and analysts a multi informational tool that allows the quantification of targets and may serve as a guide tool for the efficient employment of real estate assets

The balanced cargo vehicle routing problem with time windows

This paper addresses a variant of the vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) that targets the balancing of the load carried by each active vehicle (balanced cargo VRPTW or BCVRPTW). A new approach, based on the free disposal hull (FDH) method of data envelopment analysis, is proposed; it consists of an initial, feasible route generation procedure that employs an effective heuristic for the VRPTW, followed by an iterative method for selecting routes on the efficiency frontier, according to the criteria of the BCVRPTW and the notion of non-dominated solutions embedded within FDH. This new approach produces, according to our computational evaluation, very good results for the BCVRPTW, and can serve as the basis for solving real-life vehicle routing problems.Vehicle routing with time windows Heuristics Data envelopment analysis Free disposal hull method