Determining optimal levels of engineering characteristics in quality function deployment under multi-segment market

Customers often have various requirements and preferences on a product. A product market can be partitioned into several market segments, each of which contains a number of customers with homogeneous preferences. In this paper, a methodology which mainly involves a market survey, fuzzy clustering, quality function deployment (QFD) and fuzzy optimization, is proposed to achieve the optimal target settings of engineering characteristics (ECs) of a new product under a multi-segment market. An integrated optimization model for partitioned market segments based on QFD technology is established to maximize the overall customer satisfaction (OCS) for the market considering the weights of importance of different segments. The weights of importance of market segments and development costs in the model are expressed as triangular fuzzy numbers in order to describe the imprecision caused by human subjective judgement. The solving approach for the fuzzy optimization model is provided. Finally, a case study is provided for illustrating the proposed methodology. 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.