Cooperative fuzzy games approach to setting target levels of ECs in quality function deployment.

Zhihui Yang,Yizeng Chen,Yunqiang Yin

doi:10.1155/2014/673563

Abstract

Quality function deployment (QFD) can provide a means of translating customer requirements (CRs) into engineering characteristics (ECs) for each stage of product development and production. The main objective of QFD-based product planning is to determine the target levels of ECs for a new product or service. QFD is a breakthrough tool which can effectively reduce the gap between CRs and a new product/service. Even though there are conflicts among some ECs, the objective of developing new product is to maximize the overall customer satisfaction. Therefore, there may be room for cooperation among ECs. A cooperative game framework combined with fuzzy set theory is developed to determine the target levels of the ECs in QFD. The key to develop the model is the formulation of the bargaining function. In the proposed methodology, the players are viewed as the membership functions of ECs to formulate the bargaining function. The solution for the proposed model is Pareto-optimal. An illustrated example is cited to demonstrate the application and performance of the proposed approach.

Highlights

Game theory is the discipline which studies multiple individuals implementing the corresponding strategy according to related strategies of other individuals under some situations
According to the formulas (16) and (18), the results about the membership degree for engineering characteristics (ECs) and the overall customer satisfaction of the five competitors are listed in Table 4, where the overall customer satisfaction of Comp3 is 0.7274, which is largest amongst five competitors
Facilitate the good performance in one EC to compensate for poor performance in other ECs slightly

Summary

Introduction

Game theory is the discipline which studies multiple individuals implementing the corresponding strategy according to related strategies of other individuals under some situations. Sometimes we need to seek for the best strategies of each player taking into account that the others will behave searching for their best In this case, we call it as noncooperative games model. Players just want to deal with the cooperation issues of the problem and consider how the agents allocate the benefits of their cooperation This approach is called as the cooperative game [1, 2]. A cooperative game proceeds with the intent that the team wants to allocate resources such that all players are as better off as possible, and an improvement in the payoff for one player does not result in a loss for other players. The bargaining scheme postulated by Nash yields a unique and optimal distribution of resources such that the arbitrated outcome is Pareto-optimal [1, 2]

Results

Discussion

Conclusion