A grey method of prioritizing engineering characteristics in QFD

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a planning and problem-solving tool that is gaining acceptance for translating customer requirements into the engineering characteristics of a product. Deriving the rating order of engineering characteristics from input variables is a crucial step in applying QFD. A grey method is proposed to prioritize engineering characteristics. The engineering characteristics are considered to be comparability sequences, while the customer requirements in customer competitive analysis are considered to be reference sequences. So QFD can be regarded as a grey system and the relationships between the customer requirements and engineering characteristic can be determined with the grey relational matrix. Then grey superior analysis is used to prioritize the engineering characteristics. An example of the door design of an automobile is used to demonstrate the application of the proposed approach.