Use of ANP weighted crisp and fuzzy QFD for product development

• QFD is an effective way to identify customer needs and wants.
• ANP helps in better structuring and analyzing multi-criteria decisions situations.
• Fuzzy logic helps to represent ambiguous and imprecise decision situations.
• ANP and fuzzy logic augmented QFD is a superior tool for the product design process.

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a popular planning method often used to transform customer demands/requirements into the technical characteristics of a new or improved product or service. In order to better capture (and represent) the multifarious relationships between customer requirements and technical characteristics, and the relative weights among customer requirements, in this study a hybrid analytic network process (ANP)-weighted fuzzy methodology is proposed. The goal is to synthesize renowned capabilities of ANP and fuzzy logic to better rank technical characteristics of a product (or a service) while implementing QFD. To demonstrate the viability of the proposed methodology a real-world scenario, where a new equipment to squeeze the polyethylene pipes to stop the gas flow without damaging the pipes, is developed. The ranking of technical characteristics of the product is calculated using both crisp and fuzzy weights for illustration and comparison purposes.