Evaluation of unavailability of the railway service using AHP methodology

In last years the number of journeys on the Italian rail network is constantly increasing. The railway infrastructure is at a high risk of suffering failure and this can generate the unavailability of the railway service. The monitoring of the railway infrastructure becomes crucial to guarantee punctuality, regularity and quality to the railway service. To this aim, the paper proposes an AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) based methodology to evaluate: i) the incidence of failure on the railway infrastructure (single track) and consequently, ii) the unavailability of the railway service. The AHP methodology can represent a valid tool for the railway manager to define the priorities for the intervention and the restoration of failures according to the impact of the risk on the unavailability of the transport service.