A method for determining customer requirement weights based on TFMF and TLR

Abstract

‘Customer requirements’ (CRs) management plays an important role in enterprise systems (ESs) by processing customer-focused information. Quality function deployment (QFD) is one of the main CRs analysis methods. Because CR weights are crucial for the input of QFD, we developed a method for determining CR weights based on trapezoidal fuzzy membership function (TFMF) and 2-tuple linguistic representation (TLR). To improve the accuracy of CR weights, we propose to apply TFMF to describe CR weights so that they can be appropriately represented. Because the fuzzy logic is not capable of aggregating information without loss, TLR model is adopted as well. We first describe the basic concepts of TFMF and TLR and then introduce an approach to compute CR weights. Finally, an example is provided to explain and verify the proposed method.

Keywords:

• enterprise systems
• customer requirements
• quality function deployment
• House of Quality
• trapezoidal fuzzy membership function
• 2-tuple linguistic representation
• linguistic evaluation scale

Acknowledgements

This research was funded and supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(Grant No. 50905133), Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province, China (Grant No.2009CDB255) and Wuhan Planning Project of Science and Technology (Grant No. 201171034314).