Quality function deployment (QFD) is a widely adopted customer-oriented product development methodology by translating customer requirements (CRs) into technical attributes (TAs), and subsequently into parts characteristics, process plans, and manufacturing operations. A main activity in QFD planning process is the determination of the target levels of TAs of a product so as to achieve a high level of customer satisfaction using the data or information included in the houses of quality (HoQ). Gathering the information or data for a HoQ may involve various inputs in the form of linguistic data which are inherently vague, or human perception, judgement and evaluation for the information and data. This research focuses on how to deal with this kind of impreciseness in QFD optimization. In this paper, it is assumed as more realistic situation that the values of TAs are taken as discrete, which means each TA has a few alternatives, as well as the customer satisfaction level acquired by each alternative of TAs and related cost are determined based on subjective or imprecise information and/or data. To handle these imprecise information and/or data, an approach using some basic definitions of fuzzy sets and the signed distance method for ranking fuzzy numbers is proposed. An example of a washing machine under two-segment market is provided for illustrating the proposed approach, and in this example, the difference between the optimal solution from the fuzzy model and that from the crisp model is compared as well as the advantage of using the fuzzy model is drawn.

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a useful method in product design and development to maximize customer satisfaction. In the QFD, the technical attributes (TAs) affecting the product performance are identified, and product performance is improved to optimize customer requirements (CRs). For product development, determining the optimal levels of TAs is crucial during QFD optimization. Many optimization methods have been proposed to obtain the optimal levels of TAs in QFD. In these studies, the levels of TAs are assumed to be continuous while they are often taken as discrete in real world application. Another assumption in QFD optimization is that the requirements of the heterogeneous customers can be generalized and hence only one house of quality (HoQ) is used to connect with CRs. However, customers often have various requirements and preferences on a product. Therefore, a product market can be partitioned into several market segments, each of which contains a number of customers with homogeneous preferences. To overcome these problems, this paper proposes an optimization approach to find the optimal set of TAs under multi-segment market. Dynamic Programming (DP) methodology is developed to maximize the overall customer satisfaction for the market considering the weights of importance of different segments. Finally, a case study is provided for illustrating the proposed optimization approach.

Platform-based product family design is recognized as an effective method to satisfy the mass customization which is a current market trend. In order to design platform-based product family successfully, it is the key work to define a good product platform, which is to identify the common modules that will be shared among the product family. In this paper the clustering analysis using dendrogram is proposed to capture the common modules of the platform. The clustering variables regarding both marketing and engineering sides are derived from the view point of top-down product development. A case study of a cordless drill/drive product family is presented to illustrate the feasibility and validity of the overall procedure developed in this research.

Release planning in a software product line (SPL) is to select and assign the features of the multiple software products in the SPL in sequence of releases along a specified planning horizon satisfying the numerous constraints regarding technical prece- dence, conflicting priorities for features, and available resources. A greedy genetic algorithm is designed to solve the problems of release planning in SPL which is formulated as a precedence-constrained multiple 0-1 knapsack problem. To be guaranteed to obtain feasible solutions after the crossover and mutation operation, a greedy-like heuristic is developed as a repair operator and reflected into the genetic algorithm. The performance of the proposed solution methodology in this research is tested using a fractional factorial experimental design as well as compared with the performance of a genetic algorithm developed for the software release planning. The comparison shows that the solution approach proposed in this research yields better result than the genetic algorithm.

Release planning for incremental software development is to select and assign features in sequence of releases along a specified planning horizon. It includes the technical precedence inherent in the features, the conflicting priorities as determined by the representative stakeholders, and the balance between required and available resources. The complexity of this consideration is getting more complicated when planning releases in software product lines. The problem is formulated as a precedence-constrained multiple 0-1 knapsack problem. In this research a genetic algorithm is developed for solving the release planning problems in software product lines as well as tests for the proposed solution methodology are conducted using data generated randomly.

소프트웨어 개발에 있어서 소프트웨어를 시장에 출시하는 계획을 수립하는 것은 소프트웨어를 이루고 있는 기능들을 구현하는 데 제약이 되는 조건들(기술, 자원, 위험, 예산 등)을 만족하면서 계획된 출시기간에 이들 기능들을 할당하는 일이다. 이와 같이 소프트웨어 출시를 계획하는 것은 소프트웨어 제품라인에 대해서 고려할 때 더욱 복잡해진다. 본 연구에서는 소프트웨어 제품라인에 있어서 소프트웨어 출시 계획을 수립하기 위한 문제를 우선순위 제약하의 다수 0-1 배

Software release planning in software development is to assign its features to releases in a specified planning horizon,satisfying technology, resource, risk, and budget constraints. The release planning problembecomes more complicated when the concept of software product lines (SPL) is considered. In this research, a precedence-constrained multiple 0-1 knapsack problem regarding SPL characteristics is formulated to maximize the objective function depending on the value of the release, the importance of stakeholders, the urgency of a feature and its value to stakeholders. As the optimization solution approach, dynamic programming model is developed to solve the precedence-constrained multiple 0-1 knapsack problem as well as a heuristic and reduction algorithm are applied to reduce the size of the problem at each stage

In continuous review inventory model, (Q, r) system, order quantity(Q) and reorder point(r) should be determined to calculate inventory-related cost that consists of setup, holding, and penalty costs. The procedure to obtain the exact value of Q and r is

Most approaches for continuous review inventory problem need tables for loss function and cumulative standard normal distribution. Furthermore, it is time-consuming to calculate order quantity (Q) and reorder point (r) iteratively until required values ar