Railway service quality in northern Italy: A multilevel synthetic assessment

In order to reasonably assess the railway service quality, a multilevel extensible assessment model is proposed based on the matter element theory and the extension theory. The proposed model is applied to a real case study of some railway lines. The matter element to assess the railway service quality is established on the basis of the characteristics of passenger transit which included 7 primary assessment indices and 26 senior assessment indices. The index weights are determined by the passengers who were interviewed on board during their journey. Railway service quality is assessed by the values of the correlation degree of the matter element with all the assessment grades. The multilevel extensible assessment method can fully reflect the distance between the overall railway service quality or one kind of service attribute and the assessment grades and then it can realize the continuous assessment. The method can provide not only the passengers' overall satisfaction degree on the railway service quality but also the passengers' satisfaction degree on one assessment index.