Cooperative fuzzy games approach to setting target levels of ECs in quality function deployment.

Quality function deployment (QFD) can provide a means of translating customer requirements (CRs) into engineering characteristics (ECs) for each stage of product development and production. The main objective of QFD-based product planning is to determine the target levels of ECs for a new product or service. QFD is a breakthrough tool which can effectively reduce the gap between CRs and a new product/service. Even though there are conflicts among some ECs, the objective of developing new product is to maximize the overall customer satisfaction. Therefore, there may be room for cooperation among ECs. A cooperative game framework combined with fuzzy set theory is developed to determine the target levels of the ECs in QFD. The key to develop the model is the formulation of the bargaining function. In the proposed methodology, the players are viewed as the membership functions of ECs to formulate the bargaining function. The solution for the proposed model is Pareto-optimal. An illustrated example is cited to demonstrate the application and performance of the proposed approach.