Customer-oriented product design using an integrated neutrosophic AHP & DEMATEL & QFD methodology

Abstract

With the increasing product variety, companies aim to become better than their competitors by providing a superior product developed with a customer-oriented product design approach and a quality strategy. In order to achieve this, companies should well understand customer expectations and quickly be able to convert these expectations to technical characteristics. Since the expectations consist of mostly subjective judgments, this evaluation process contains vagueness and impreciseness. A triplet represents the uncertainty in subjective judgments: the degrees of belongingness or Truthiness (T), non-belongingness or Falsity (F), and indeterminacy (I). For this reason, in this paper, a neutrosophic Quality Function Deployment (QFD) methodology based on neutrosophic AHP and neutrosophic DEMATEL is developed and applied to the design of a car seat. In this methodology, the weighting of customer requirements is performed by neutrosophic AHP. The relationships among the technical characteristics are determined by neutrosophic DEMATEL for the customer-oriented product design, considering both impreciseness in the data and indeterminacy of the decision-makers. In other words, the contribution of this paper is that the proposed methodology provides better integration of the voice of customers into technical characteristics through a practical fuzzy multi-criteria decision analysis. Based on the results, it is revealed that seat height is the most important technical characteristic, followed by vertical travel range and horizontal travel range. Moreover, validity and verification of the proposed methodology have been tested with other methods presented in the literature. Sensitivity analyses have been carried out to show the flexibility of the given decisions under different cases. Lastly, possible implications on theoretical and managerial aspects have been discussed.