A fuzzy nonlinear model for quality function deployment considering Kano’s concept

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a customer-driven approach for processing new product developments in order to maximize customer satisfaction. Each engineering design characteristic is maximized for product performance according to the level of customer satisfaction. To cope with the vague nature of product development processes, fuzzy approaches are used to represent the importance scores of customer requirements (CRs), the relationship between CRs and design requirements (DRs) and relationship between the DRs themselves. Considering Kano’s category of design requirements, this paper extends Chen and Weng’s model (2003), and presents a fuzzy nonlinear model to determine the performance level of each DR for maximizing customer satisfaction, under the same group of constraints as that in Chen and Weng’s model. The results, from an illustrative example, indicate that the total degree of customer satisfaction achieved by the proposed nonlinear model is greater than that by the original fuzzy model.