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Timely identification of heterogeneous customer requirements serves as a vital step for a company to formulate product strategies to meet the diverse and changing needs of its customers. By relaxing the search for global patterns in classical clustering, we propose a biclustering-based method, BiHCR, to identify heterogeneous customer requirements from the perspective of local patterns detection. Specifically, conforming to customers' attitudes toward products derived from customer participation, we first transform the original data matrix with customers as rows and customer requirements as columns into a binary matrix. Then, by combining the two significant biclustering algorithms, Bimax and RepBimax, we design BiHCR to identify the biclusters embedded in the binary matrix to improve the detection results from the larger biclusters and their overlaps. Furthermore, the empirical case of smartphone development in a Chinese company verifies that BiHCR can identify homogeneous subgroups of customers with similar requirements without redundant noise compared with Bimax. Additionally, in contrast to RepBimax, our proposed BiHCR can also detect the intractable overlapping biclusters in the binary matrix used to describe the heterogeneity of customer requirements. Since the process of customer participation in product development gradually became a dominant approach to collecting customer requirements information for many industries, a conceptual framework of customer requirements identification is constructed and the detailed steps are clarified for manufacturers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In quality function deployment (QFD), establishing the relationship matrix is quite an important step to transform ambiguous and qualitative customer requirements into concrete and quantitative technical characteristics. Owing to the inherent imprecision and fuzziness of the matrix, the fuzzy linear regression (FLR) is gradually applied into QFD to establish it. However, with regard to an FLR model, the h value is a critical parameter whose setting is always an aporia and it is commonly determined by decision makers. To a certain extent, this subjective assignment fades the effectiveness of FLR in the application of QFD. Aiming to this problem, FLR models with optimized parameters h obtained by maximizing system credibility are introduced into QFD in this paper, in which relationship coefficients are assumed as asymmetric triangular fuzzy numbers. Moreover, a systematic approach is developed to identify the relationship matrix in QFD, whose application is demonstrated through a packing machine example. The final results show that FLR models with optimized h values can always achieve a more reliable relationship matrix. Besides, a comparative study on symmetric and asymmetric cases is elaborated detailedly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uncertain variables are used to describe the phenomenon where uncertainty appears in a complex system. For modeling the multi-objective decision-making problems with uncertain parameters, a class of uncertain optimization is suggested for the decision systems in Liu and Chen (2013), which is called the uncertain multi-objective programming. In order to solve the proposed uncertain multi-objective programming, an interactive uncertain satisficing approach involving the decision-maker's flexible demands is proposed in this paper. It makes an improvement in contrast to the noninteractive methods. Finally, a numerical example about the capital budget problem is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and the relevant solving approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many conceptual design methods have been proposed, there is still ample room for improvement. First, most conceptual design methods do not relate concepts generation by a combination of basic features to the feasibility of the concepts. Second, those methods may have ignored customer preferences in modeling concept selection. To overcome these shortcomings, a quality-engineering-based conceptual design approach is proposed in this paper by integrating the use of quality function deployment (QFD), morphological matrix analysis (MMA), multi-attribute decision-making techniques (MADM), and possibilistic optimization models (POMs). A possibility distribution function (PDF) is applied to account for the uncertainties of technology development cost in the early design stages, and a mathematical framework is established by incorporating the customer-perceived relative importance into a possibilistic optimization model for design concept selection, which plays a central role in the proposed methodology. Contrary to deterministic optimization models (DOMs), the proposed possibilistic optimization can produce results that are more informative and more reliable to the designers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]