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Although the business environment is stochastic, deterministic data envelopment analysis (DEA) models are typically used to measure the efficiency of commercial banks for the purpose of simplicity. Bank operations are characterized by a network structure due to the dual role of deposits, which, on the one hand, are the output of the process of borrowing funds from depositors and, on the other hand, are the input of the process of making loans. Since the outputs of the production process of the bank are correlated with its inputs, the model for measuring efficiency in this case is a stochastic program with correlated data. To take the correlation between the inputs and outputs into consideration, in this paper, a standard normal transformation is applied for the correlated data, and a network stochastic model is developed to obtain the distribution of the stochastic efficiency. The model is used to measure the efficiency of twenty-two commercial banks in Taiwan. The results are more reliable, discriminative, and informative than those obtained from the existing models. They also show that the performance of a bank is mainly affected by its loan performance. Different from the stereotype suggesting that private companies usually operate more efficiently than state-owned companies, public banks perform better than private banks in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper mainly discusses the network reliability of an online-food delivery system with stochastic capacity, named the stochastic online-food delivery system (SODS). The capacity that is the number of available food delivery persons in each region is stochastic because the food delivery workers can choose their shift. Transportation time and loading space constraints are considered in this paper. The transportation time consists of the waiting time at restaurants, and the food delivery worker's driving time to reach the customer's location cannot exceed the time constraint. The space weight denotes the proportion of the commodity's space in the delivery box. Each food delivery worker will deliver multiple commodities under the space constraint. This paper evaluates the network reliability of the SODS. Network reliability is defined as the probability of meeting the commodity requirements within space and time constraints. Network reliability can be used as a performance indicator to present the SODS system status. A case of an online-food delivery system in front of Taipei railway station in Taiwan is presented to emphasize the management implications of network reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the service performance of a freeway system, in which the speed on each section is stochastic owing to user behavior, accidents, tunnels, road gradient, and road repairs. A stochastic-flow freeway network (SFFN) is constructed to model the freeway system with stochastic speed. System reliability is defined as the probability of a certain number of vehicles in a freeway system completing their journey smoothly within a restricted time. Two SFFN models were built to describe the relationships among traffic flow, system time and stochastic speed. After obtaining the probability distribution of speed by collecting historical data, two algorithms with respect to different models were proposed to generate all minimal speed vectors (MSVs). The system reliability can be subsequently computed in terms of MSVs. The Taiwan freeway system was considered as a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models and algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]