Sustainable Innovation in Process Engineering Using Quality Function Deployment Approach and Importance-Satisfaction Analysis of Requirements

Growing demands for cleaner production and higher eco-efficiency in process engineering require a comprehensive analysis of technical and environmental outcomes of customers and society. Moreover, unexpected additional technical or ecological drawbacks may appear as negative side effects of new environmentally friendly technologies. The paper conceptualizes a comprehensive approach for analysis and ranking of engineering and ecological requirements in process engineering in order to anticipate secondary problems in eco-design and to avoid compromising the environmental or technological goals. For this purpose, the paper presents a method based on integration of the Quality Function Deployment approach with the Importance-Satisfaction Analysis for the requirements ranking. The proposed method identifies and classifies comprehensively the potential engineering and eco-engineering contradictions through analysis of correlations within requirements groups such as stakeholder requirements (SRs) and technical requirements (TRs), and additionally through cross-relationship between SRs and TRs.