Expected value-based method to determine the importance of engineering characteristics in QFD with uncertainty theory

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a systematic method used for developing a product or service, that helps transforming customer requirements (CRs) into appropriate engineering characteristics (ECs). How to obtain the importance of ECs in QFD is a fundamental and crucial issue for efficiently planning resource allocation. Owing to the typical imprecision or vagueness in the QFD process, the uncertain environments and the uncertainty theory are suggested for capturing those linguistic assessments and subjective judgements. Thus, in this paper, a new method for determining the importance of ECs using an uncertain expected value operator is presented, in which the two sets of input data are expressed as uncertain variables, namely, the relative importance of CRs and the relationship matrix between CRs and ECs. An example of a exible manufacturing system design illustrates the performance and the potential applications of the presented approach.