A rough set based QFD approach to the management of imprecise design information in product development

Intense competition and sophisticated customer needs have resulted in the development of more complex products with a shorter lead time to market. One of the key factors in product development concerns the understanding and management of complex relationships between customers’ needs and technical requirements. Usually these complex relationships are expressed using imprecise descriptions in the form of natural linguistic terms. Frequently, quality function deployment (QFD) is employed to manage design information and assist decision‐making in human centered product development. This work proposes a rough set based QFD approach to manage the aforementioned imprecise design information in product development. A novel concept known as rough number^*, which is derived from the basic notions of rough sets, is proposed to manage the imprecise design information in QFD analysis. A case study on a bicycle design is used to illustrate the approach proposed. The result shows that the new approach proposed can effectively manage the imprecise design information and facilitate decision‐making in product development.