An evidential reasoning based approach for quality function deployment under uncertainty

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a methodology for translating customer wants (WHATs) into relevant engineering design requirements (HOWs) and often involves a group of cross-functional team members from marketing, design, quality, finance and production and a group of customers. The QFD team is responsible for assessing the relationships between WHATs and HOWs and the interrelationships between HOWs, and the customers are chosen for assessing the relative importance of each customer want. Each member and customer from different backgrounds often demonstrates significantly different behavior from the others and generates different assessment results, complete and incomplete, precise and imprecise, known and unknown, leading to the QFD with great uncertainty. In this paper, we present an evidential reasoning (ER) based methodology for synthesizing various types of assessment information provided by a group of customers and multiple QFD team members. The proposed ER-based QFD methodology can be used to help the QFD team prioritize design requirements with both customer wants and customers' preferences taken into account. It is verified and illustrated with a numerical example.