Design of railway superstructure parameters: A quality function deployment approach

Unfortunatelly, railways which is one of the transportation systems in use in our country is not at the place where it should be. Having approxiamately higher construction cost and harder and more costly expropiration works during route decision phase compared to highway can be counted among reasons for the situation of railways in Turkey. However, all developed countries value the railways exceedingly.The most important approach to stimulate railways usage is ensuring more comfortable, safe, reliable and affordable travelling opporunity via railways. Railways superstructure can be constructed by two techniques as ballasted or balastless tracks.This thesis is aimed to evaluate railway superstructure parameters by QFD (Quality Function Deployment) method. In order to do that, first customer requests were defined, then technical requirements for meeting the needs were put forth. After this step, house of quality which is the main tool of QFD was constituted. The level of relationship between customer needs and technical requirements were identified by the house of quality.Moreover, the level of importance of customer needs are found out by consulting those who works in private or public service of railways, academicians, engineers who work related to transportation issue, authorities about railways operations and consumers who use railways for their journeys via questionnaries.At the last stage of the study, which type of superstructure meets the requirements better were compared by obtaining the importance degree of technical requirements.