A rough set enhanced fuzzy approach to quality function deployment

Quality function deployment (QFD) provides a systematic methodology to assist companies in developing quality products that are able to satisfy customer needs. The house of quality (HOQ), as the first phase of QFD, plays the most important role in product development. Frequently, fuzzy numbers are used to quantify the vagueness of linguistic terms so as to facilitate subjective assessments in the HOQ. However, the issue concerning how to determine the boundary intervals of fuzzy numbers remains unresolved. This work proposes a novel approach based on rough set theory, and introduces two concepts called rough number and rough boundary interval to address this issue. A comparative case study presented in this work shows that the proposed approach has significant advantages compared to the prevailing fuzzy number based method in processing subjective linguistic assessments in QFD.