Application of fuzzy theory to value engineering

Recently considerations regarding Target Costing and Cost Management have been focussed on Value Engineering (VE). In the stage of the Function Evaluation, one of the most significant stages of the VE job plan, either the absolute evaluation by amount of money or the relative evaluation by rating is employed, to evaluate the function of items and to determine the priority of improvement in the value. Although fuzziness is a constituent of both methods, there are no techniques in VE to address such fuzziness. The author proposes therefore, to introduce the Fuzzy Theory into the evaluation in order to address such fuzziness practically and systematically. Furthermore, in order to demonstrate how the proposed method works, practical examples of the evaluation of function are provided for which the priority of improvement has been successfully identified.