New product design using FDMS and FANP under fuzzy environment

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a customer-oriented design approach in processing new product developments in order to reach maximum customer satisfaction. Design requirements (DRs) and part characteristics are important decision making problems during QFD activity processes for new product development. Here a Fuzzy decision-making system (FDMS) considering customer needs (CNs) as factors is proposed to formulate the problem. The structure of the FDMS is based on fuzzy control rules. Thus, CNs are determined as input variables and fuzzified using membership function concept. Weights of these factors are then fuzzified to ensure the consistency of the decision maker when assigning the importance of each factor over another. By applying IF-THEN decision rules, DRs of the firm are scored. This paper also uses Fuzzy analytic-network process (FANP) to determine the fulfillment levels of DRs of the firm. The comparison of FDMS with Fuzzy analytical network process (FAHP) is also presented. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.