Title: New approach for quality function deployment with an extended alternative queuing method under linguistic Pythagorean fuzzy environment

Authors: Ye-Jia Ping; Ran Liu; Ze-Ling Wang; Hu-Chen Liu

Addresses: School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China ' School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China ' School of Management, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200444, China ' College of Economics and Management, China Jiliang University, Hangzhou 310018, China; School of Economics and Management, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China

Abstract: As a customer-driven tool to support the development of new products or services, quality function deployment (QFD) is able to transform customer requirements (CRs) into suitable engineering characteristics (ECs) to maximise the customer satisfaction. However, the conventional QFD method has some weaknesses limiting its effectiveness in the real applications. In this study, a new QFD approach based on linguistic Pythagorean fuzzy sets (LPFSs) and alternative queuing method (AQM) is constructed to enhance the performance of the traditional QFD. First, we express the assessments from experts on the relationships between CRs and ECs using the LPFSs. Second, we apply an extended AQM to determine the importance prioritisation of ECs. Additionally, a consensus reaching algorithm is adopted to dynamically determine the relative weights of experts considering their inconsistent judgements. An illustrative application of 5G smartphone development is conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and efciency of our proposed QFD approach. Through the empirical case with a comparative analysis, the proposed approach is proved to be useful and practical for capturing experts' opinions and prioritising ECs in QFD. [Submitted: 19 March 2020; Accepted: 11 April 2021]

Keywords: quality function deployment; QFD; linguistic Pythagorean fuzzy set; LPFS; alternative queuing method; AQM; consensus reaching method; product development.

DOI: 10.1504/EJIE.2022.121912

European Journal of Industrial Engineering, 2022 Vol.16 No.3, pp.349 - 370

Received: 19 Mar 2020
Accepted: 11 Apr 2021

Published online: 07 Apr 2022 *

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