Determination of Importance Weights in QFD using Fuzzy AHP

In the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) process determining the importance weights for the customer requirements is an essential and crucial process. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been used to determine the importance weights for product planning but this has occurred mainly in crisp (non-fuzzy) decision applications. However human judgment on the importance of customer requirements is always imprecise and vague. To make up for this deficiency in the AHP a fuzzy AHP with an extent analysis approach is proposed to determine the importance weights for the customer requirements. In the method triangular fuzzy numbers are used for the comparison of a fuzzy AHP. By using the extent analysis method and the principals for the comparison of fuzzy numbers one can derive the weight vectors. The new approach can improve the imprecise ranking of customer requirements inherited from studies based on the conventional AHP. Furthermore the fuzzy AHP with extent analysis is simple and easy to implement to prioritize customer requirements in the QFD process compared with the conventional AHP. The project uses an example of college to illustrate the proposed approach.