Copyright © 2012 Ming Li. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a customer-driven approach for product design and development. A QFD analysis process includes a series of subprocesses, such as determination of the importance of customer requirements (CRs), the correlation among engineering characteristics (ECs), and the relationship between CRs and ECs. Usually more than group of one decision makers are involved in the subprocesses to make the decision. In most decision making problems, they often provide their evaluation information in the linguistic form. Moreover, because of different knowledge, background, and discrimination ability, decision makers may express their linguistic preferences in multigranularity linguistic information. Therefore, an effective approach to deal with the multi-granularity linguistic information in QFD analysis process is highly needed. In this study, the QFD methodology is extended with 2-tuple linguistic representation model under multi-granularity linguistic environment. The extended QFD methodology can cope with multi-granularity linguistic evaluation information and avoid the loss of information. The applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated with a numerical example.