Prioritizing engineering characteristics in quality function deployment with incomplete information: A linear partial ordering approach

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) has been used as the concurrent engineering tool to save the production cost and time. It is not easy to get information or knowledge for the prioritization of customer attributes and engineering characteristics during the QFD planning process. This research suggests a linear partial ordering approach for assessing the knowledge from participants and prioritizing engineering characteristics. The linear partial information will be used in extracting weights of customer attributes and relationship values of customer attributes between engineering characteristics. Using the linear partial ordering can reduce the cognitive burden of designers and engineers of QFD planning team. Four types of dominance relation that are frequently used in multi-attribute decision making with incomplete information are used to determine the priorities of engineering characteristics when the linear partial orderings of participants are given. The dominance relations between engineering characteristics can be established by solving a series of linear programming problems.