Dynamic requirements exploration method using grey theory operations for flexible platform design

Flexible platform was a kind of module-scale-based product platform having the advantage of modular and parametric adjustment capabilities. The first aspect in its planning was the requirements analysis and prediction for the kernel platform. By analyzing the requirements dynamic characteristics such as unbalancing, uncertain, individuation and phase variability, a customer requirements exploration method using grey system theory was proposed for flexible platform design. With the data pre-acquisition process, the importance ranking of customer and technical requirements were computed by grey relational analysis. Then the trends were fitted by one level grey model to achieve stage prediction. The integrated method was merged in the quality function deployment to analyze the requirements weights in house of quality. The efficiency and effectiveness of the method were illustrated in the requirement analysis for hydraulic support platform, and the results were compared with other methods.