  It is an important management task of metro agencies to formulate reasonable
improvement schemes based on the result of service quality surveys. Considering
scores, weights, and improvement feasibility of service quality attributes in a
certain period, this paper integrates Decision Tree (DT) into
Importance-Performance analysis (IPA) to build a DT-IPA model, which is used to
determine the improvement priority of attributes, and to quantify the
improvement degree. If-then rules extracted from the optimal decision tree and
the improvement feasibility computed by analytic hierarchy process are two main
items derived from the DT-IPA model. They are used to optimize the initial
improvement priority of attributes determined by IPA and to quantify the degree
of improvement of the adjusted attributes. Then, the overall service quality
can reach a high score, realizing the operation goal. The effectiveness of the
DT-IPA model was verified through an empirical study which was taken place in
Changsha Metro, China. The proposed method can be a decision-making tool for
metro agency managers to improve the quality of metro service.
