Abstract
In Quality function deployment (QFD) approach, customers tend to express their needs in linguistic terms rather than exact numerical values and these needs generally contain vague and imprecise information. To overcome this challenge and to use the method more effectively for complex customer-oriented design problems, this paper introduces a novel intuitionistic Z-fuzzy QFD method based on Chebyshev’s inequality (CI) and applies it for a new product design. CI provides the assignment of a more objective reliability function. The reliability value is based on the maximum probability obtained from CI. Then, the expected values of lower and upper bounds of interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy (IVIF) numbers are determined. A competitive analysis among our firm and competitor firms and an integrative analysis for the different functions of QFD is presented. The proposed Z-fuzzy QFD method is applied to the design and development of a hand sanitizer for struggling with COVID-19.
Highlights
With each passing day, customers’ expectations of the product that they are planning to purchase are increasing
The purpose of this study was to develop a novel approach integrating the reliability with the assigned fuzzy values of Quality function deployment (QFD) method based on the principles of the probability theory
The contribution of our method to the literature is the presentation of a new reliability integrated QFD approach under intuitionistic fuzziness with all its aspects such as technical difficulty, competitive analysis through customer demands (CDs) and technical descriptors (TDs)
Summary
Customers’ expectations of the product that they are planning to purchase are increasing. One of the latest extensions of intuitionistic fuzzy sets is circular intuitionistic fuzzy sets developed by Atanassov (2020) They add the uncertainty of the membership and non-membership degrees by defining a circle with radius “r” for these values. In this paper IVIFSs are employed in the proposed QFD method taking into consideration the reliability of the assigned IVIF numbers. The reliability in this method is handled by Z-fuzzy numbers developed by Zadeh (2011). The advantage of our method is that it presents the QFD approach under intuitionistic fuzziness with all its aspects such as technical difficulty, competitive analysis through CDs and TDs. The rest of this study is organized as follows.
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