Efficient extraction of information from correlation matrix for product design using an integrated qfd-dematel method

Abstract

Decision of importance rating of technical requirements in House of Quality is very important in the quality function deployment process of product design. The correlation matrix in the roof of House of Quality is seldom used by designers as it is difficult to quantify interactions of technical requirements. Although there are a few studies addressed effects of the correlation matrix of House of Quality, very few of them discussed a systematic evaluation for interactions of technical requirements using information of the roof part in House of Quality. A significant gap exists in the efficient extraction of information from the correlation matrix. This paper introduces a method for analyzing the roof data of House of Quality to extract additional information of correlations between technical requirements based on the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory, analytic network process, and quality function deployment. A case study of designing a hand rehabilitation device is presented to demonstrate advantages of the proposed method.