A methodology of determining aggregated importance of engineering characteristics in QFD

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a planning and problem-solving tool that is gaining acceptance for translating customer requirements (CRs) into engineering characteristics (ECs) of a product. Deriving the importance of ECs is a crucial step of applying QFD. However, the inherent fuzziness in QFD presents a special challenge to effectively evaluate the importance of ECs and correlation among them. Furthermore, degree of impact of an engineering characteristic (EC) on the other ECs also reflects the importance of the ECs. In previous studies, those impacts were neglected or simply represented using a linear combination in determining the importance of ECs. To address this issue, in this paper, a new methodology of determining aggregated importance of ECs is presented which involves the consideration of conventional meaning of importance of ECs as well as the impacts of an EC on other ECs. In the proposed methodology, fuzzy relation measures between CRs and ECs as well as fuzzy correlation measures among ECs are determined based on fuzzy expert systems approach. These two types of measures are then used to determine the aggregated importance of ECs. An example of design of a digital camera is used to illustrate the proposed methodology.