The Criteria for Identifying the Quality of Passengers’ Transportation by Railway and Their Ranking Using Ahp Method

Abstract

Abstract. Passengers' transportation by rail involving various interested groups, such as managers, service staff and passengers, is a complicated process. Decision-making persons, organizing railway trips should take into account the interests, needs and possibilities of these particular groups. The solution to some problems associated with passengers' transportation by rail depends on the experience and qualification of decision-makers, people who are responsible for the effectiveness of this work. To increase the quality of railway trips, the interested parties, groups of people mentioned above, should coordinate their actions, cooperate with each other in solving the problems and exchange relevant information. Therefore, the increasing quality of passenger transportation is a complicated issue, requiring good professional skills based on knowledge, practical experience, high intellect and new ideas of all the people involved in this process. The current paper presents a diagram showing passenger's transportation quality with a number of criterion groups A, B, C, D matching the structure and numbers of the questions included in the questionnaires to survey respondents (passengers) and experts (service and administration staff of the train). What is more, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology based on the pair wise comparison of criteria is used to determine their weights (significances) considering the data obtained from the respondents and experts of each of three categories. Only these questionnaires which have no contradictory estimates are used. Also, the calculation methods demonstrating the results of the survey are provided in this work. One more point such as the data elicited from the respondents who took part in the survey (i.e. passengers from the train running on the international route Vilnius-Moscow) and experts (i.e. service staff of the already mentioned train and representatives of the administration staff from the Joint-Stock Company 'Lithuanian Railways' (AB ,,Lietuvos geležinkeliai")) is analyzed. Finally, the conclusions for improving the quality for passenger transportation by Lithuanian railways are given.

Quantitative and Qualitative Basis of Customer Relationship Management Concept Development in the Adriatic Ports

“…for quantitative criteria It should be emphasized that determining weight coefficients through interviews requires from the respondents to be expert, and to have a highly developed ability of logical reasoning, so that the assessment of even only one highly qualified expert (or, 20 professionals and long-time users, such as the case with this paper) is more significant than the assessment of a far larger number of less expert and experienced persons in this area (Sivilevičius et al, 2010). Using formulae (1) and (2), values of weight coefficients Ai w and B j w , as well as Excel embedded function SUMPRODUCT (Šekularac-Ivošević et al, 2012), in the manner described in detail in the previous paragraph, perception maps represented in Figures 1 and 2 have been created.…”

E-Services and Positioning of Passenger Ports in the Context of Cruise Tourism Promotion

“…In line with the previously noted, the comparative analysis of the availability of e-services and traffic intensity should be realized as part of next research steps in this domain. Besides these rather general conclusions, on the basis of research conducted in the paper, the following more precise conclusions might be derived as well: -Some relevant e-services of eleven analyzed cruising ports in EU, including the Montenegrin Port of Kotor as cruising one, have been identified and categorized; -The relatively large number of identified e-services have been sublimed per each category by simple binary approach, as a way of data pre-processing for the following quantitative and qualitative analysis; -Multi-expert choice expressed in the form of Saaty matrix and the corresponding mathematical analyses [33][34][35][36] have been used for ranking the considered e-service categories; -The final rank of the analyzed cruise ports is determined by combining binary and Saaty approaches (see Table 4 for final numerical results); -On the basis of conducted calculus for each (all) type(s) of considered e-services, it becomes clear that ports: Southampton and Venice should be treated as models or ideal cruise ports for positive repositioning of all the other ports considered in this paper on the (global) cruise port market (see Table 1 for some more details on e-services they offer); and, -The Port of Kotor should be repositioned according to all explored categories of e-services especially regarding the transactional ones. These observations should be used as a particular base for further more detailed and rigorous investigation in this challenging sphere, concerning cruise ports development and their proper (re)positioning at the (global) permanently and rapidly developing cruise port market.…”

“…In order to answer this question, the authors interviewed ten respondents who are experienced in passenger port operations, sea ports marketing, and (cruise) tourism, and who have high level of logical thinking to rank the considered types of e-services according to their importance to the passengers and ports development. It is important to emphasize here that the estimation, or opinion, of only one highly qualified expert may be more important than the estimates made by a number of inexperienced persons [33]. However, for the purpose of this research, the highly qualified and experienced respondents have been asked to compare each pair of different types of passenger port e-services (c, v, i, i/t, and t) according to the Saaty [34] scale by using the grades: 1 -same importance; 3 -slightly more importance, 5 -moderately more importance, and 7 -strongly more or absolute importance of the first over the second considered criterion; or, by the corresponding reciprocity values depending on the mutual importance of the compared elements composing certain criteria pair(s).…”

“…The overall rank of the considered types of e-services which the analyzed ports offer is calculated by the standard statistical procedure and it is given in the last column of Table 3 [33,35]. It is based on subjectively estimated importance of the considered types of e-services by the interviewed experts.…”

Application of Multicriteria Decision-Making Methods in Railway Engineering: A Case Study of Train Control Information Systems (TCIS)

“…In terms of the quality of railway passenger transportation, AHP was used for determination of weights for criteria [100] and indictors [101,102] and for the different maintenance actions in the railway infrastructure [103], relative weights of quality of service criteria in the high-speed railway wireless communication networks [104], weights of 16 criteria of the quality of the trip by train [105]. In [6], AHP was used to develop a model for evaluation of TCIS and their subsystems, as well as KPTs in terms of sustainability.…”