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

The proposed model uses the stochastic dynamic programming and in particular Markov decision processes applied to the RailQuality 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 ofcomfort and safety), the proposed mathematical approach allows to find the solutions to the decision-making process infunction of the probability of deterioration of the state variables of the infrastructure over time and of the flow of availableresources.