Rough set-based approach for modeling relationship measures in product planning

Quality function deployment (QFD) provides a planning and problem-solving methodology that is widely renowned for translating customer requirements (CRs) into engineering characteristics (ECs) for new product development. As the first phase of QFD, product planning house of quality (PPHOQ) plays a very important role in this process. The degrees and directions of the relationship measures between CRs and ECs have serious effects on the special planning of ECs, modeling the relationship measures is an important step in constructing PPHOQ The current paper presents a rough set (RS)-based approach for modeling relationship measures by determining the knowledge and experience of the QFD team, aided by the introduction of the type factor of a relationship used to express the effects of the relationship types. A study of general cases is used to demonstrate the performances and limitations of the proposed RS-based approach. The results show that the novel approach effectively determines the relative knowledge of the QFD team and facilitates decision-making in new product development. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.