An integrated fuzzy decision approach for product design and evaluation

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a well-known customer driven technique for planning and designing a new product. To address the inner-relationship and inter-relationship among QFD components, several researchers applied fuzzy analytic network process (fuzzy ANP) to QFD. Their approaches focus on determining important engineering characteristics, but neglect the subsequent prototype product evaluation. Moreover, the weight of the elements in their supermatrices is represented by crisp values rather than fuzzy numbers. To address the two issues, this paper develops an integrated product design and evaluation method that can effectively identify important engineering characteristics and select the best prototype product. The proposed method uses two-stage QFD charts to identify customer requirements, engineering characteristics, and evaluation attributes. A fuzzy analytical network process method is developed to derive QFD component weights in terms of fuzzy numbers. To select the best prototype product, a fuzzy multi-attribute decision making (fuzzy MADM) approach is proposed. A case study is given to illustrate how the proposed method is applied.