Quality Function Deployment under Multiple Preference Formats with Various Uncertainties

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a cross-functional planning methodology used to ensure that customer expectations or requirements are deployed through product planning, part development, process planning, and production planning. It requires a significant number of subjective judgments, expressed precisely in a numerical format, from both customers and QFD team members. However, in practice, people tend to give their preferences in many different ways, numerically or linguistically, precisely or imprecisely, completely or incompletely, depending on their backgrounds, domain knowledge, judgment capability, and the like. Little research effort has been made on how to model multiple preference formats in QFD, particularly with various uncertainties, such as incomplete, imprecise, and vague information. This project therefore proposes to fill the gap.The project will investigate how QFD can be implemented under multiple preference formats with various uncertainties and how the correlations between product attributes can be incorporated into QFD. A novel group decision making methodology will be developed to model multiple preference formats with uncertainties in QFD.