Rough Sets and DEA — a hybrid model for technology assessment

Technology management in complex ecosystems requires advanced technology assessment tools. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a powerful tool for a multi-criteria comparative performance assessment of different objects (Decision Making Unit — DMU) in the same class. However, the DEA method is capable of adequately differentiating DMUs only when the number of analysed criteria is a few times less than the number of DMUs. Application of DEA in technology assessment requires prior data redundancy reduction due to the multiplicity of technology assessment criteria. The literature suggests various approaches to limiting the cardinality of the criteria sets for the performance analysis using the DEA method. One of the popular approaches is to create synthetic criteria by means of the Principle Component Analysis (PCA). This paper, in turn, proposes a sophisticated rough sets concept. Due to the nature of technology analysis, namely, a small number of objects and many criteria with linguistic values, the proposed approach based on the concept of rough sets seems to be appropriate.