New approach for quality function deployment based on multi-granular unbalanced linguistic information and consensus reaching process

Abstract

As a widely used product improvement technique, the quality function deployment (QFD) can satisfy customer requirements and realize higher customer satisfaction by translating them into corresponding engineering characteristics. Nonetheless, two basic challenges hinder the effective application of QFD are the imprecise relationship assessments between customer requirements and engineering characteristics because of the uncertainty inherent in human judgements and the unreasonable importance ranking of engineering characteristics due to the heterogeneity of domain experts. In response, this paper puts forward a new hybrid QFD approach for the priority of engineering characteristics to satisfy customer requirements. First, multi-granular unbalanced linguistic term sets are utilized to describe the vague relational evaluations between customer requirements and engineering characteristics. Then, the opinion evolution social network consensus reaching model is employed to assist QFD experts in deriving consensual relational evaluations. Taking the conflict customer requirements into consideration, the combined compromise solution method is adopted and extended to derive the priority orders of engineering characteristics. To illustrate the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed QFD approach, a product development case about low pressure pulse filter is provided with comparative analysis and simulation experiments. The results show that the proposed approach can represent complex linguistic relationship assessments of experts and determine more accurate priority orders of engineering characteristics in QFD.