The quality function deployment method under uncertain environment using evidential reasoning: a case study of compressor manufacturing

In recent years, the issue of customer satisfaction achieving on the basis of improving service quality has been widely investigated. To achieve this goal, one of well-structured method is quality function deployment (QFD). QFD is an approach defining customer requirements (CRs) and translating them into relevant design requirements (DRs). The successful implementation of QFD requires a significant number of subjective evaluations of both customers and QFD team members. The QFD team members evaluate relationships between DRs and CRs and interrelationships between DRs. The customers evaluate relative importance of each CRs. In the basic QFD, crisp values are used for determining relationships between DRs and CRs, but the mentioned method are not suitable to address the subject of uncertainty, since in most cases QFD team express their opinions with uncertainty and therefore resulting in inappropriate implementation of QFD. This paper aims to apply a QFD method based on evidential reasoning approach to handle uncertain evaluation information provided by QFD team in compressor manufacturing. This method is able to consider uncertainties such as interval, imprecise and incomplete data in utilizing belief structure and then aggregating them to prioritize engineering DRs according to CRs.