A fuzzy AHP approach to the determination of importance weights of customer requirements in quality function deployment

Quality function deployment (QFD) is an important tool in product planning that could contribute to increase in customer satisfaction and shorten product design and development time. During the QFD process, determination of the importance weights of customer requirements is a crucial and essential step. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been used in weighting the importance. However, due to the vagueness and uncertainty existing in the importance attributed to judgement of customer requirements, the crisp pairwise comparison in the conventional AHP seems to be insufficient and imprecise to capture the degree of importance of customer requirements. In this paper, fuzzy number is introduced in the pairwise comparison of AHP. An AHP based on fuzzy scales is proposed to determine the importance weights of customer requirements. The new approach can improve the imprecise ranking of customer requirements which is based on the conventional AHP. Finally, an example of bicycle splashguard design is used to illustrate the proposed approach.