Customer driven reliability: integration of QFD and robust design

Reliability of a product is defined and evaluated by the customer. Reliability is a time oriented quality characteristic. New measures of reliability based on disutility and continuous degradation of the state of the product are presented. A reliability function deployment approach is outlined by integrating quality function deployment (QFD) and FMEA (failure modes and effects analysis) to respond to the customer needs and expectations on product reliability. Robust design strategies to prevent both performance degradation and hard failures are discussed