The house of quality in a design process

The product development process is subject to randomness of duration of design activities and a path followed through the network of activities. In this paper, the qualitative relationships between various attributes of the design process and the corresponding design process variables are captured using the house of quality and then transformed into quantitative relationships. The impact of the process control variables on the design process attributes is discussed. The problem of determining optimal values of the design process variables to maximize the combined quality index of the critical design activities is modelled as a geometric programming problem.