PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF THE SECURITY MANAGEMENT OF CHANGJIANG MARITIME SAFETY ADMINISTRATIONS: APPLICATION WITH UNDESIRABLE OUTPUTS IN DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS

Marine accidents would not only cause considerable loss of human life and property, but also seriously affect the safety of navigation environments. Effective security management could guarantee the prevention of marine accidents. By analysing the systematic patterns of Changjiang Maritime Safety Administration (MSA) of the People's Republic of China, this study constructed a suitable navigation security assessment model for evaluating security management performance. Our dataset was derived from the official website of Changjiang MSA, which is composed of seven MSA branches, in terms of Chongqing, Yichang, Yueyang, Wuhan, Huangshi, Anqing and Wuhu, respectively. The main research data component was focussed on marine accidents that have occurred in the Changjiang River, covering six varieties of marine accident without explicit input (WEI) variables. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a mathematical method for measuring the relative efficiencies of peer decision-making units (DMUs) with multiple inputs and outputs. A DEA-WEI model was implemented and applied to the evaluation in this study. According to the evaluation, we identified collision and foundering-based accidents to be the two most common varieties of marine accidents in the Changjiang River. We also observed-higher safety performance in the MSAs controlling the upper and middle reaches of the Changjiang River, especially the 213 Chongqing and Yueyang MSAs, than in those controlling the lower reaches. Therefore, Chongqing and Yueyang could be adopted as references for improving the overall security management performance in the Changjiang River area.