Evaluating Electricity Distributors Efficiency Using Self-Organizing Map and Data Envelopment Analysis

This paper presents an alternative approach to the one developed by the Brazilian National Agency of Electric Energy (ANEEL) for analysis of efficient operating costs of electricity distributors. The approach adopted by the agency clusters distributors by the magnitude of the market, applying an input-oriented Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model in two stages in which the second phase is used to adjust the efficiency considering environmental variables of each concession area. The aim of this paper is to use Self-Organizing Map (SOM) for grouping the distributors with similar environmental variables of the concession areas and later, to assess the distributors efficiency, through the same first stage DEA model performed by ANEEL. This approach eliminates the DEA second stage procedure, presenting a new way of analyzing distributors efficiencies.