Fuzzy Linguistic Quality Assessment for Public Transport Domain

The primary objective of the marketing set-up is the customers´ satisfaction. It is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet customer expectations. The companies that know customer expectation can deliver services/products of superior quality compared with those services provided by conceivable competitors, this is the key for the company success in the modern era. This paper presents QuAM (Qu-ality A-ssessment M-odel), a quality assessment model. QuaM is a customer-centric model: the quality of the asset/item/service is evaluated by the customer perceptions. The customers are invited to express their opinions by filling in an informative questionnaire, this way, all the answers are collected and then processed to get a global evaluation. For this purpose the model exploits the fuzzy linguistic approach to represent the users´ judgments and Computing with Words (CWW) paradigm, based on two linguistic aggregation operators LOWA and LWA to compute the overall quality assessments. This model has been applied to public transport domain, where a stringent requirement is to reach a balanced trade-off between the company goals and the customer expectations. The public transport company indeed would like to increase the quality perceived by customers, optimizing bus routes in the area and reducing costs, at the same time, users demand reliability, safety and quality for the bus lines. A case study in this domain shows that our model provides a straightforward quality evaluation to support the company in the marketing strategies and in achieving the customers´ satisfaction.