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.

1. Instroduction
 2. Model
  2.1 Modelling the OCS for a Product Market
  2.2 Formulating the Development Budget Constraint
  2.3 Optimization Model
  2.4 Optimization Model with Fuzzy Numbers
 3. An Illustrative Example
 4. Conclusions
 Acknowledgements
 References

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