Abstract
Purpose - In a context of international economic crisis the improvement in the efficiency and productivity of public services is seen as a way to maintain high-quality levels at lower costs. Increased productivity can be promoted through benchmarking exercises, where key performance indicators (KPIs), individually or aggregated, are used to compare health units. The purpose of this paper is to describe a benchmarking platform, called Hospital Benchmarking (HOBE), where hospital's services are used as the unit of analysis. Design/methodology/approach - HOBE platform includes a set of managerial indicators through which hospital services' are compared. The platform also benchmarks services through aggregate service indicators, and provides an aggregate measure of hospital's performance based on a composite indicator of the service's performances. These aggregate indicators were obtained through data envelopment analysis (DEA). Findings - Some results are presented for Portuguese hospitals for the trial years of 2008 and 2009, for which data is publicly available. Details for the service-level analysis are provided for a sample hospital, as well as details on the aggregate performance resulting from services performances. Practical implications - HOBE's features and outcomes show that the platform can be used to guide management actions and to support the design of health policies by administrative authorities, provided that good quality and timely data are available, and that hospitals are involved in the design of the KPIs. Originality/value - The platform is innovative in the sense that it bases its analysis on hospital's services, which are in general more comparable among hospitals than indicators of hospital overall performance. In addition, it makes use of DEA to aggregate performance indicators, allowing for user choice in the inputs and outputs to be aggregated, and it proposes a novel model to aggregate service's efficiencies into a single measure of hospital performance.

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Abstract
This study pursues the operational improvement of urban transportation services. Non-foreseen events lead to the occurrence of delays, which are further propagated during the daily operations of bus services. This paper applies an optimization model to obtain robust schedules of bus lines. The model builds a new schedule which minimizes delays and anticipations from a set of observations. The decision variables are the slack time to be allocated at each segment of two subsequent stops. The solutions obtained are assessed with two robustness measures: price of robustness (i.e. the deviations from schedule) and the percentage of absorbed delays. The results obtained in a real-world case study (a bus line operating in Porto) are promising. © 2015, Springer International Publishing Switzerland.

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This paper investigates the performance of the largest Brazilian hydropower plants. This study covers 78% of the total installed capacity from hydros in the country, and considers indicators reflecting operational and maintenance costs as well as quality of service. The assessment was conducted using a new approach for the construction of composite indicators, based on a directional distance function model. First, we assessed the hydropower plants allowing for complete flexibility in the definition of weights, enabling the identification of underperforming plants, and quantification of their potential for improvement. Next, we assessed the plants considering different perspectives regarding the importance attributed to each indicator. This allowed reflecting different points of view, focusing primarily on operation and maintenance costs or quality issues. The results identify the hydropower plants that can be considered benchmarks in different scenarios, and allow testing the robustness of plants' classification as benchmarks in the unrestricted model.

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This paper explores the changes in value added (VA) of a sample of schools for cohorts of students finishing secondary education between 2005 and 2008. VA estimates are based on distance measures obtained from DEA models. These measures are computed for each pupil in each school, and evaluate the distance between the school frontier in a given year and a pooled frontier comprising all schools analysed. The school VA is then computed by aggregating the VA scores for the cohort of pupils attending that school in a given year. The ratio between VA estimates for two consecutive cohorts, that attended the school in different years, is taken as the index of VA change. However, the evolution of school performance over time should consider not only the movements of the school frontier, but should also take into account other effects, such as the proximity of the students to the best-practices, represented by the school frontier, observed over time. For that purpose we developed an enhanced Malmquist index to evaluate the evolution of school performance over time. One of the components of the Malmquist index proposed measures VA change, and the other measures the ability of all school students to move closer to their own school best practices over time. The approach developed is applied to a sample of Portuguese secondary schools.

Abstract
The promotion of quality of life is becoming ever more important in a scenario of regional, national and even international competition among cities, triggered by globalization. Public sites, and green spaces in particular, which are available in varying extent in all urban areas, can bring important benefits to urban vitality and, as a consequence, to quality of life. However, cities are intricate entities and measuring their success in converting the potential for public green space usage into increased quality of life is a difficult task. In order to contribute to the objective of assessing the potential for public green space use, and its consequences on urban vitality, we applied the Data Envelopment Analysis technique to assess a total of 174 European cities. The results detect the best performing cities, and for the cities considered inefficient, a set of benchmarks is identified, whose best practices can be copied to support efforts of performance improvement.