Heterogeneous Information Integrated QFD for Smart Bicycle Design

Abstract

The developing technology started to define a new set of functions and potentials for the products. Customers that keep up with the developing technologies expect to experience cutting-edge technologies in their products. Amid these expectations, the market has become a very competitive place where everybody wants to strike the customer’s attention with high technology. On the other hand, non-customer oriented high technology often intimidates end-users, and that decreases the preferability of the product. Motivated by the critical importance of customer-oriented design, this contribution presents a smart product design methodology with heterogeneous information. The non-homogeneity of the information comes from its variant decision-making group as the potential customers and experts. Quality Function Deployment (QFD), which is a very well known, powerful tool for product design is chosen for this methodology. House of Quality (HoQ) of QFD is extended with the 2-Tuple linguistic model to create a flexible environment for decision makers (DMs). Furthermore, multi-preference relations technique is used to handle heterogeneous information while calculating the customer requirements’ importance. A case study about the smart bicycle design is presented with the results to test the plausibility of the suggested methodology at the end of the contribution.