The Rail Quality Index as an Indicator of the “Global Comfort” in Optimizing Safety, Quality and Efficiency in Railway Rails

摘要

The proposed model uses the stochastic dynamic programming and in particular Markov decision processes applied to the Rail Quality Index (RQI - Italian Indice di Qualità del Binario, IQB ).By performing the integrated analysis of the classes of variables which characterize the overall service quality (in terms of comfort and safety), the proposed mathematical approach allows to find the solutions to the decision-making process in function of the probability of deterioration of the state variables of the infrastructure over time and of the flow of available resources.