Research on Metro Service Quality Improvement Schemes Considering Feasibility
This provides a decision-making tool for metro agency managers to enhance service quality, but it is incremental as it builds on existing IPA methods.
This paper tackles the problem of improving metro service quality by developing a DT-IPA model that integrates Decision Tree into Importance-Performance analysis to prioritize and quantify attribute improvements based on feasibility, verified through an empirical study in Changsha Metro, China.
It is an important management task of metro agencies to formulate reasonable improvement schemes based on the result of service quality surveys. Considering scores, weights, and improvement feasibility of service quality attributes in a certain period, this paper integrates Decision Tree (DT) into Importance-Performance analysis (IPA) to build a DT-IPA model, which is used to determine the improvement priority of attributes, and to quantify the improvement degree. If-then rules extracted from the optimal decision tree and the improvement feasibility computed by analytic hierarchy process are two main items derived from the DT-IPA model. They are used to optimize the initial improvement priority of attributes determined by IPA and to quantify the degree of improvement of the adjusted attributes. Then, the overall service quality can reach a high score, realizing the operation goal. The effectiveness of the DT-IPA model was verified through an empirical study which was taken place in Changsha Metro, China. The proposed method can be a decision-making tool for metro agency managers to improve the quality of metro service.