The freight sector is an important component of China’s national economy. It is composed of multiple sub-sectors and has a complex internal structure. This internal structure can hide information on the freight sector’s operational performance. Previous studies on transportation operational performance made measurements based on the whole transportation sector, and all of these studies ignored the impacts that the internal structure of the sub-sectors have on performance, which leaves a gap in the research. To illustrate this structure, this study proposes a parallel slacks-based measure model to measure transportation efficiency, which can represent the freight sector’s operational performance. The efficiencies of transportation operations for the whole freight sector and its three sub-sectors are further measured, by treating the sub-sectors as parallel subunits. Then, the inefficiency sources from the sub-sectors can be identified by the proposed model. To detect the environmental impact on transportation operations, energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions are also considered in the evaluation. On the basis of the proposed approach, an application of the Chinese freight sector from 2013 to 2017 is provided. The impacts of influential factors on transportation efficiency are also explored. The empirical findings can be illustrated as follows: (1) there exist significant disparities in regional transportation efficiencies in the freight sector and its sub-sectors; (2) the inefficient transportation performance of the Chinese freight sector mainly derives from the poor performance of the waterway sub-sector; and (3) freight volume and population density have positive impacts on the transportation efficiencies of the railway and highway sub-sectors. Finally, some policies for improving transportation efficiency are also provided.

Due to the differences in the economic and social environment, production technology heterogeneity exists in the logistics industry among provinces in China. If this fact is ignored, the evaluation result of logistics efficiency may be biased. To this end, this study developed a new analysis framework for evaluating logistics efficiency with the consideration of technology heterogeneity and carbon emission through a metafrontier data envelopment analysis (DEA) method. Furthermore, the source of logistics inefficiency were identified. The proposed method was employed in the regional logistics industry in China from 2011 to 2017. The following empirical findings could be drawn: (1) The overall logistics efficiency is low in China, and great potential exists in improving logistics efficiency. (2) Significant disparities exist in logistics efficiency and the technology gap among the three areas. The east area has higher logistics efficiency with advanced technology, while the central area and the west area have lower logistics efficiencies. (3) The technology gap and management issues in the utilization of logistics resources are the two primary reasons resulting in the logistics efficiency loss in China. The effect of the management factor is significant in the east area, while the impact of the technology gap is dominant in the central area and the west area. Some policy suggestions for enhancing logistics efficiency are provided.

To date, along with the rapid development of urban rail transit (URT) in China, the evaluation of operational efficiency and energy efficiency has become one of the most important topics. However, the extant literature regarding the efficiency of URT at the line level and considering carbon emissions is limited. To fill the gap, an evaluation model based on slacks-based measure (SBM) data envelopment analysis (DEA) is proposed to measure the efficiencies, which is applied to 61 URT lines in China’s four megacities. The findings are summarized as follows: (1) The average operational efficiency and energy efficiency of URT lines are low, and both have great room for improvement. (2) There are significant disparities in the efficiency of URT lines in the case cities. For instance, the average operational efficiency of URT lines in Guangzhou is higher than that of other cities, while the average energy efficiency of URT lines in Shanghai is higher than that of other cities. (3) The URT lines operated by state-owned enterprises have higher average operational efficiency, while the lines operated by joint ventures have higher average energy efficiency. Finally, some suggestions are provided to improve the efficiencies.

The Aircraft Arrival/Departure Problem (AADSP) is the core problem in current runway system, even has become the bottleneck to prevent the improvement of the airport efficiency. This paper studies the single runway AADSP. A Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model is constructed and an algorithm named Ant Colony based on Rank 2 Matrix Approximation (RMA-AC) method is proposed. Numerical results validate that the new algorithm, as well as the new model, exhibits better performance than CPLEX and the traditional two-phase algorithm. The runway efficiency enhanced by RMA-AC, within 20 s computation, is about 2–5% even for the 800 aircraft sequences. It is a promising method to improve the efficiency of the future aircraft scheduling system.

With rapid urbanization in China, land use efficiency (LUE) and related sustainability should be reasonably evaluated and improved. Studies have rarely investigated urban LUE and lack an analysis from the sustainability perspective. Long-term analysis can help identify the weaknesses in LUE and obtain a more stable evaluation. Hence, in this paper we develop a dynamic data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to assess urban LUE considering the time dimension. Differing from studies on traditional static DEA models, this study connects the observed periods by creating a common objective function. In addition, a method for estimating the sustainability of urban LUE is proposed under the DEA framework. The proposed method was applied to 34 major Chinese cities over a 3-year period, from 2015 to 2017. The results reveal that urban LUE still has potential for improvement in most cities. There was a distinct difference in efficiency among eastern, central, and western cities during the observed period. The average efficiency was higher in eastern cities than in central and western cities. The potential to optimize the land area and GDP should be realized with more efforts by most cities to strengthen LUE. Additionally, most inefficient cities have weak performance regarding the sustainability of LUE. The proposed approach enriches the sustainable measurement of LUE. Some management implications are provided to improve urban LUE. The empirical findings provide important support for sustainable land use in practice, and the proposed model is an important empirical extension of the DEA method in the land management field.