A new hesitant fuzzy QFD approach: An application to computer workstation selection

•A new hesitant fuzzy MCDM method based on linguistic term sets is proposed for QFD.•The proposed method is relatively more efficient than the existing QFD approaches.•It can aggregate the linguistic assessments of more than one decision maker.•The relations between CRs&DRs and correlations among DRs via HFLTS are considered.•A sensitivity analysis for robustness check is realized.

Computer workstation selection is a multiple criteria decision making problem that is generally based on vague linguistic assessments, which represent human judgments and their hesitancy. In this paper, a new fuzzy quality function deployment (QFD) approach is used to effectively determine the design requirements (DRs) of a computer workstation. Hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTS) are innovatively employed to capture the hesitancy of the experts in this approach. More precisely, the proposed new QFD approach is the first study that determines the importance of customer requirements (CRs), the relations between CRs and DRs and the correlations among DRs via HFLTS. Additionally, HFLTS based Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods are utilized in the computational steps to select the best computer workstation. A real industrial application is carried out to validate the implementation of the proposed approach.

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