Applying OWA operator to model group behaviors in uncertain QFD

It is a crucial step to derive the priority order of design requirements (DRs) from customer requirements (CRs) in quality function deployment (QFD). However, it is not straightforward to prioritize DRs due to two types of uncertainties: human subjective perception and user variability. This paper proposes an OWA based group decision-making approach to uncertain QFD with an application to a flexible manufacturing system design. The proposed model performs computations solely based on the order-based semantics of linguistic labels so as to eliminate the burden of quantifying qualitative concepts in QFD. Moreover, it incorporates the importance weights of users and the concept of fuzzy majority into aggregations of fuzzy preference relations of different DRs in order to model the group behaviors in QFD. Finally, based on a quantifier-guided net flow score procedure, the proposed model derives a priority ranking with a classification of DRs into important and unimportant ones so as to provide a better decision-support to the decision-maker.International Symposium, IUKM 2013, Beijing, China, July 12-14, 2013