New approach for quality function deployment based on proportional hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets and prospect theory

Abstract

As a powerful instrument to fulfil customer needs, quality function deployment (QFD) is capable of converting customer requirements (CRs) into appropriate engineering characteristics (ECs) in the product design and development. Nevertheless, the inherent defects of the conventional QFD, such as the description of experts’ opinions with crisp numbers and the non-robust ranking of ECs, confine its efficiency and potential applications. In this study, a novel QFD approach using proportional hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (PHFLTSs) and prospect theory is proposed to overcome the insufficiencies of the traditional QFD. Specifically, the relationships between CRs and ECs are represented by PHFLTSs and the weights of CRs are derived with the best-worst method (BWM). An extended prospect theory is employed for the prioritisation of the ECs that have been identified. Finally, two application examples are provided to examine the applicability and advantages of our proposed QFD approach.

Keywords:

• quality function deployment
• proportional hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (PHFLTS)
• prospect theory
• best-worst method
• new product development

Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to the respected editors and the anonymous referees for their insightful and constructive comments, which helped to improve the overall quality of the paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 61773250], [grant number 71671125], [grant number 71402090] and the Program for Shanghai Youth Top-Notch Talent.