A fuzzy expected value-based goal programing model for product planning using quality function deployment

Product planning is one of four important processes in new product development using quality function deployment (QFD), which is a widely used customer-driven approach. In this article, a hierarchical framework for product planning using QFD is developed. To tackle the fuzziness in functional relationships between customer requirements and engineering characteristics (ECs) in product planning, the least squares method is incorporated into fuzzy regression to investigate those functional relationships, by which a more central tendency can be obtained. Furthermore, a fuzzy expected value-based goal programming model is proposed to specify target values of ECs. Different from some fuzzy product planning approaches for QFD, the proposed programming model has unambiguous interpretations. An illustrated example of a quality improvement problem of emulsification dynamite-packing machine design is given to demonstrate the application and performance of the proposed approach.