QFD-based product planning with consumer choice analysis

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a widely adopted customer-oriented methodology to assist in product design and development. In a traditional QFD-based product planning process, the importance weights of customer requirements (CRs) in house of quality are obtained by analyzing and generalizing the requirements of various customers, and the purpose of the subsequent optimal setting of engineering characteristics (ECs) and process parameters is to achieve a higher level of overall customer satisfaction (OCS). However, nowadays customers' requirements are increasingly diversified and customers usually have heterogeneous preferences. Consequently, customers in a product market may have different purchasing choice behaviors and satisfaction criteria toward a new product. Therefore, heterogeneity of CRs should be considered in QFD-based optimization models to describe the relationship between CRs and ECs and to model the OCS. In this paper, a novel QFD-based product planning approach is proposed for a product market with diversified CRs by integrating consumer choice behavior analysis. The contributions of this paper include: 1) customers' purchase choice rules are introduced into QFD-based product planning process to simulate the purchase behavior of a customer toward a product; 2) two new QFD-based optimization models under deterministic and multinomial logit consumer choice rules are proposed to help firms improve the product quality under environment of diversified CRs; 3) the established model under deterministic consumer choice rule is transformed into an equivalent linear model to facilitate the solving process; and 4) the established optimization models are further extended for products with both continuous and discrete target values of ECs.