A choquet capacity and integral based method to identify the overall importance of engineering characteristics in quality function deployment

Abstract

Deriving the overall importance of engineering characteristics from the information of the house of quality is one of the primary tasks in the quality function deployment. In this paper, we consider the information processing of house of quality as the multicriteria ordered sorting or classification problem, in which the multiple engineering characteristics are regarded as the multiple criteria, the partial evaluations of products on multiple engineering characteristics as the multiple inputs, and the customer perceptions of products in terms of ordered classes as the aggregate outputs. Given this consideration, we adopt the Choquet capacity to describe the importance degrees of engineering characteristics as well as the correlations among engineering characteristics, employ the Choquet integral to represent the grades of products on customer requirements, and construct the Choquet capacity and integral based methodology to derive the overall importance of engineering characteristics. The steps of the proposed methodology are discussed in detail and also illustrated with a digital camera design example