Coping with Group Behaviors in Uncertain Quality Function Deployment

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a planning and problem-solving tool gaining wide acceptance for translating customer needs (CNs) into technical attributes (TAs) of a product. It is a crucial step to derive the prioritization of TAs from CNs in QFD. However, it is not so straightforward to prioritize TAs due to two types of uncertainties: human subjective perception and user variability. The main focus of this article is to propose a group decision-making approach to uncertain QFD with an application to a flexible manufacturing system design. The proposed approach performs computations solely based on the order-based semantics of linguistic labels to eliminate the burden of quantifying qualitative concepts in QFD. Moreover, it incorporates the importance weights of users and the concept of fuzzy majority into aggregations of individual fuzzy preference relations of different TAs in order to model the group behaviors in QFD. Finally, based on a quantifier-guided net flow score procedure, the proposed approach derives a priority ranking with a classification of TAs into important and unimportant ones so as to provide a better decision-support to the decision-maker. Due to the easiness in articulating preferential information, our approach can reduce the cognitive burden of QFD planning team and give a practical convenience in the process of QFD planning.