A project evaluation system in the state economic information system of China: An operations research practice in public sectors

Operations Research (OR) methodology and its mathematical models have been widely accepted as management means in China, not only in industry and agriculture, but also in non-profit organizations, including the governmental departments and institutions. In this paper, we introduce an OR practice in the State Information Center (SIC) of China. The task is to design and develop a system, the Project Evaluation System, for SIC to manage investments in the various parts of the State Economic Information System of China (SEIS). It is a decision support system with various OR models and algorithms combined together as the core part of the system. Data Envelopment Analysis is used to evaluate the relative efficiencies of the sub-systems of the SEIS and the Analytic Hierarchy Process methodology is adopted to form the decision process. To allocate further investment to the sub-systems, an investment prediction model for non-profit organizations was formulated which is in a format of a parametric linear programming problem. This new OR model can be applied in many decision problems in economy and finance. We also discuss in this paper the experience summed up from our practice.