A fuzzy model for exploiting quality function deployment

Quality function deployment (QFD) is the product development process to maximize customer satisfaction. The engineering design characteristics related to product performance are specified for this purpose. For dealing with the fuzzy nature in the product design processes, fuzzy approaches are applied to represent the relationships between customer requirements (CRs) and engineering design requirements (DRs) as well as among the DRs. A new measure for evaluating the fuzzy normalized relationships is derived. A fuzzy model is formulated to determine the fulfillment level of each DR for maximizing the customer satisfaction under the resource limitation and the considerations of technical difficulty and market competition. The producing ranges of fulfillment level of each DR and those of customer satisfaction can provide the QFD team with more information. An example is used to illustrate the model.