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.

• Jaewook Yoo(Department of Business Administration, Dong-A University) | 유재욱 Corresponding Author