New approach for quality function development based on cooperative game-based consensus mechanism and three-way decision method

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a team-based product development approach for identifying critical engineering characteristics according to customer requirements to improve customer satisfaction. Nonetheless, there are some limitations in the current QFD methods when used in real-world situations. For example, most of them cannot handle experts’ conflict opinions regarding the correlation evaluations between customer requirements and engineering characteristics, and only focus on how to acquire a complete importance ranking of engineering characteristics which is unnecessary in many realistic cases. In this study, we aim to develop a new QFD approach by using the cooperative game consensus reaching process and three-way decision theory. First, the cooperative game-based consensus mechanism is applied to help experts reach a consensus on the correlation assessments between customer requirements and engineering characteristics. Then, an extended three-way decision method is adopted to obtain the importance classifications of engineering characteristics and identify the critical ones for product improvement. Finally, the proposed QFD approach is illustrated with a case study regarding renewable energy storage technology improvement, and its efficiency and advantages are verified via comparative analysis and simulation analysis.