Evaluation on the performance of highway companies using goal programming model

. Highway companies engage in projects with governments through the concession model in which the governments’ aim is in fulfilling public interest while the highway companies aim to increase their financial stability. However, highway companies face various operational risks that would impede their financial excellency. Therefore, this paper aims to assess the financial performances of the highway companies with the goal programming (GP) model. The GP model is a powerful tool in solving multi-objective issues. This paper studies the listed highway companies, namely LITRAK, TALIWRK, and EDGENTA from 2017 to 2022 using financial data. Based on the optimal solution of GP model, all three companies have reached the goals for assets, equities, and optimum management items. LITRAK, TALIWRK, and EDGENTA have underachievement for the goal of liability management. The GP model has identified the potential improvements for these highway companies for further improvement based on the benchmark values.


Introduction
The Malaysian government has partnered up with private companies for the building and maintenance of infrastructure.In particular, major road transportation infrastructures are built and normally maintained and improved by private companies.In Malaysia, most of the highways are developed with the concession model or turnkey projects where the private companies become the concessionaires for the agreed concession duration before the entire infrastructure is returned to the public [1].This is also known as the build-operate-transfer agreement [2].In common setting, the private companies who build and manage the highways obtain revenues from the highway users through toll tariffs, wherein this authority to collect toll tariffs is usually given by the government as the granting authority [3].On top of that, the companies will also obtain their monthly income from the government as per the agreement.However, this monthly income may vary based on the performances of the companies.These companies will be assessed in terms of their operational, environmental, financial, and social performances [4].
Highway concessionaires or companies usually face high operational risk, which will affect highway planning, construction project schedule, and cost management.Many companies have built beyond the basic infrastructures for highways as the world moves towards automation and robotics where sensors and equipment such as LiDAR and vision cameras are needed to show real time status and prevent accidents on the highways [5].These also allows various control mechanisms to take place including traffic diversion when the traffic volume is high, extra warnings when there is possible visual impairment due to bad weather or auto alert when the road is impaired [6,7].Besides, for better planning, highway companies also begin to adopt simulations for highway planning and construction for integrated and connected infrastructure to shorten travel time for public interest and determine the compaction quality for sustained quality of the highway [8,9].The companies can also understand and reduce the eco-environmental impact of the highway construction to allow them to adhere to the respective country's sustainability rules [10,11].However, while managing the operational, environmental, and social performances, there is also a need to monitor the financial performances of the highway companies as a highway project is an enormous expense.
Therefore, this paper aims to assess the financial performances of the highway companies in Malaysia using goal programming model.Since this involves several objectives and is a multi-objective situation, the goal programming (GP) model is used.The GP model is formed to minimize divergence from each goal [12][13][14][15][16][17].The objectives are goals with respective aspirations.The goals are soft constraints with deviations to note the incremental or decremental amount to reach the constraints [18,19].The positive and negative deviations would be minimized, which then forms the objective function of the study [20].GP model has received great popularity in portfolio optimization [21][22][23][24], site selection [25][26][27], energy planning [28][29][30], and supply chain management [31][32][33][34].This study is novel as there is a research gap in assessing the financial performances of the highway companies in Malaysia using GP model.In this paper, the GP model contributes by helping the highway companies determine the additional resources to reach their goals.This study would also help the companies to identify the accomplishable items based on the optimal solution of GP model.This paper shall continue with data and methods, empirical results, and conclusion.

Data and Methods
This paper assesses the financial performances of the highway companies in Malaysia with the GP model from 2017 to 2021.The highway companies are LITRAK, TALIWRK, and EDGENTA.Table 1 highlights the six goals of this study [35,36].  1 shows the goals for assessing the financial performances of the highway companies LITRAK, TALIWRK, and EDGENTA.The goals in maximizing assets, equities, profits, revenues, and optimum management items can be achieved based on zero negative deviational value.The goal in minimizing liabilities is aimed at zero positive deviational value.
The model used in this study is formulated below [37,38].
subject to: Liability constraint: Equity constraint: Profit constraint: Revenue constraint: Optimum management items constraint: The goals will be summed and compared among LITRAK, TALIWRK, and EDGENTA.The biggest assets, equities, profits, revenues, and optimum management items will be the benchmark values.On the other hand, the smallest liabilities will serve as the benchmark value.LINGO software is used in this study.LINGO is a powerful software which is used to solve optimization models.[39][40][41][42][43][44].

Empirical Results
The results of the assessment of the financial performances of the highway companies LITRAK, TALIWRK, and EDGENTA are shown here.3 to 5.  3, LITRAK has reached the goals for assets, equities, profits, and optimum management items because the negative deviational value is 0.0000 based on the optimal solution of GP model.LITRAK has 3.2985 trillion MYR, 2.6473 trillion MYR, and 0.6587 trillion MYR in excess for assets, equities, and profits.The optimum management item goal is perfectly achieved.However, the goal to maximize revenues is not reached because there is a negative deviational value of 7.5770 trillion MYR.LITRAK should increase its revenues to 11.0357 trillion MYR.LITRAK has liabilities of 7.3585 trillion MYR, in which LITRAK should reduce the liabilities by 2.4795 trillion MYR to hit the 4.8790 trillion MYR benchmark value.Based on Table 4, TALIWRK is able to achieve the goals for assets, equities, and optimum management items.TALIWRK has excess of 4.0096 trillion MYR and 3.2491 trillion MYR of assets and equities.The goal for optimum management items is achieved.On the contrary, TALIWRK records 0.1801 trillion MYR lower profit than the benchmark value, therefore, TALIWRK should increase its profits from 0.9733 trillion MYR to 1.1534 trillion MYR.Meanwhile, TALIWRK also has revenue of 2.8761 trillion MYR, which should be increased by 8.1596 trillion MYR to reach the target value of 11.0357 trillion MYR.In addition, TALIWRK should reduce its liabilities by 2.5888 trillion MYR to reach 4.8790 trillion MYR.EDGENTA has reached all the goals of maximization for assets, equities, profits, revenues, and optimum management items.There are overachievements of 0.0828 trillion MYR, 0.5972 trillion MYR, and 0.9180 trillion MYR in equities, revenues, and optimum management items.However, EDGENTA has not achieved the goal for liabilities.EDGENTA should reduce its liabilities from 6.6244 trillion MYR by 1.7454 trillion MYR to reach the benchmark value of 4.8790 trillion MYR.

Goals
Table 6 displays the summary of the benchmark and model values of LITRAK, TALIWRK, and EDGENTA.Based on Table 6, LITRAK, TALIWRK, and EDGENTA have achieved the goals for assets, equity, and optimum management items.LITRAK and TALIWKR have not attained the goal for revenues because of the negative deviational values from the benchmark value.TALIWRK has also not reached the goal for profit because its model value is lower than the benchmark value.

Conclusion
In conclusion, this study has assessed the financial performances of the listed highway companies, namely LITRAK, TALIWRK, and EDGENTA in Malaysia from 2017 to 2022 using GP model.Based on the optimal solution of GP model, these companies have reached the goals for assets, equities, and optimum management items except liabilities.For the goal underachievement of liabilities, the GP model has identified the potential improvements for these highway companies based on the deviation of benchmark values.This study provides insights to the highway companies to understand their financial performance and further improvement.

Table 1 .
Goals of this study.

Table 2 .
Assets, liabilities, equities, profits, revenues, and optimum management items of LITRAK, TALIWRK, and EDGENTA (trillion MYR)., and optimum management items (40.7864) serve as the benchmark values for LITRAK, TALIWRK, and EDGENTA.The benchmark value for liabilities is 4.8790.The results of the achievement and non-achievement of the financial goals of LITRAK, TALIWRK, and EDGENTA are reflected in Tables

Table 7
presents the deviational values from the benchmark values of LITRAK, TALIWRK, and EDGENTA.

Table 7 ,
LITRAK, TALIWRK, and EDGENTA have surplus of liabilities by 2.4795 trillion MYR, 2.5888 trillion MYR, and 1.7454 trillion MYR, which should be reduced to reach the benchmark values.The profit of TALIWRK is also short of 0.1801 trillion MYR.The revenues of LITRAK and TALIWRK are 7.5770 trillion MYR and 8.1596 trillion MYR.