The branch headquarters secure the budgets from the Korea Express Corporation (KEC) to control and operate snow and ice during the winter season every year. These budgets will be used to purchase snow and ice control materials, such as sodium chloride (NaCl), calcium chloride (CaCl2), and sand, to operate snow and ice control equipment, such as vehicles plows, and graders, and to operate manpower. Basically, the budgets are allocated and distributed with respect to the environment and condition for each branch including the most recent three-year average snowfalls and road network size to manage. However, after the winter season, there was no performance measure for snow and ice operation and control during the winter season.
Based on this background, the objective of this study is to develop a procedure to assess the performance of snow and ice operation and control during the winter season. To perform this objective, this study applied a data envelopment analysis (DEA), which is a nonparametric method in operations research and economics for the estimation of production frontiers. Also, this study utilized a one-year winter season snow and ice operation and control data obtained from the KEC from 2019 to 2020. The amounts of snowfall, freeway length, manpower, equipment, and materials distributed to each branch were used for input variables, while , manpower, equipment, and materials spent by each branch were used for output ones. Since the variables with respect to snowfall and freeway length are not controllable, they were regarded as uncontrollable variables in the analysis.
As a result of evaluation by the BCC model, 23 out of 43 branches were inefficient. Deriving the potential improvement for the inefficiently evaluated branches, it was found that the equipment should be reduced the most among input variables. As a result of conducting a t-test to see if there was an average difference when applying the potential improvement, the average difference was statistically significant in the case of manpower and equipment, on the other hand, calcium chloride and sodium chloride was not statistically significant.
Based on the result of this study, it is expected that it can be used to evaluate the operational efficiency of snow and ice removal resources on national and local roads.