Using genetic programming for developing relationship between engineering characteristics and customer requirements in new products

In product planning, development of models of relationship between engineering characteristics and customer requirements in new products is an important process in quality function deployment (QFD), which is a widely used customer driven approach. In this paper, a methodology based on genetic programming (GP) is presented to generate a reliable model that can be used to predict the customer requirements from the engineering characteristics. The proposed GP based method, which has the capability to carry out simultaneous optimization of model relationship structures and parameters, is used to automatically generate accurate nonlinear models relating the two requirements. A case study of the digital camera design shows that the proposed GP based method produce a more accurate and interpretable models than the other commonly used methods, which ignore nonlinear terms in the model development.