A Method for Customer Demands Groups Segmentation in Product Design Based on Fuzzy Clustering and Trigonometric Functions

Customer involvement become more and more important in product design and the most important problem is how to turn the customer demands into design knowledge, which makes the customer demands segmentation a hot topic in academic. A method for customer demands segmentation based on fuzzy clustering and trigonometric functions was proposed. Firstly, a customer-classified framework based on fuzzy clustering was presented. Then, 7 steps for partitioning clustering customer demand based on trigonometric functions were designed. Finally, an example of customer demands groups segmentation in stroller design was given to verify the feasibility and advantages of the method.