The Extension of Quality Function Deployment Based on 2-Tuple Linguistic Representation Model for Product Design under Multigranularity Linguistic Environment

Quality function deployment QFD is a customer-driven approach for product design and development. A QFD analysis process includes a series of subprocesses, such as determination of the importance of customer requirements CRs , the correlation among engineering characteristics ECs , and the relationship between CRs and ECs. Usuallymore than group of one decisionmakers are involved in the subprocesses to make the decision. In most decision making problems, they often provide their evaluation information in the linguistic form. Moreover, because of different knowledge, background, and discrimination ability, decision makers may express their linguistic preferences in multigranularity linguistic information. Therefore, an effective approach to deal with the multi-granularity linguistic information in QFD analysis process is highly needed. In this study, the QFD methodology is extended with 2-tuple linguistic representation model under multi-granularity linguistic environment. The extended QFD methodology can cope with multigranularity linguistic evaluation information and avoid the loss of information. The applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated with a numerical example.