An evaluation approach to engineering design in QFD processes using fuzzy goal programming models

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a product development process used to achieve higher customer satisfaction: the engineering characteristics affecting the product performance are designed to match the customer requirements. From the viewpoint of QFDs designers, product design processes are performed in uncertain environments, and usually more than one goal must be taken into account. Therefore, when dealing with the fuzzy nature in QFD processes, fuzzy approaches are applied to formulate the relationships between customer requirements (CRs) and engineering design requirements (DRs), and among DRs. In addition to customer satisfaction, the cost and technical difficulty of DRs are also considered as the other two goals, and are evaluated in linguistic terms. Fuzzy goal programming models are proposed to determine the fulfillment levels of the DRs. Differing from existing fuzzy goal programming models, the coefficients in the proposed model are also fuzzy in order to expose the fuzziness of the linguistic information. Our model also considers business competition by specifying the minimum fulfillment levels of DRs and the preemptive priorities between goals. The proposed approach can attain the maximal sum of satisfaction degrees of all goals under each confidence degree. A numerical example is used to illustrate the applicability of the approach. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.