The U.S. Navy explores detailing cost reduction via Data Envelopment Analysis

In this paper we show how a variation of Data Envelopment Analysis, the Generalized Symmetric Weight Assignment Technique, is used to assign sailors to jobs for the U.S. Navy. This method differs from others as the assignment is a multi-objective problem where the importance of each objective, called a metric, is determined by the decision-maker and promoted within the assignment problem. We explore how the method performs as the importance of particular metrics increases. Finally, we show that the proposed method leads to substantial cost savings for the U.S. Navy without degrading the resulting assignments’ performance on other metrics.