A p-ary Choquet-based multicriteria decision-making model for customer-oriented product design scheme selection

Abstract

As an efficient customer-oriented product design tool for converting customer requirements (CRs) into quality characteristics (QCs) of a product, quality function deployment (QFD) is applied to the selection of new product design schemes. However, the effective implementation of QFD is hampered by two fundamental challenges: (a) biases in people’s understanding of customer satisfaction and (b) the ambiguously assessed relationship between CRs and QCs because of the inherent uncertainty in human judgment. Therefore, this paper provides a p-ary Choquet-based multicriteria decision-making model to rank new product design schemes considering customer psychological and risk attitudes. The selection of a new product design scheme is divided into two stages. In the first stage, the $p$-ary Choquet integral converts the objective technical parameters of a new product design scheme into utility, which is the subjective feeling from the perspective of two-factor theory. Then, the integration of 2-additive measures and the Choquet integral is used to account for the redundancy and complementary effects among customer requirements. Finally, a case study of an electric vehicle manufacturing company and a comparison analysis are presented to illustrate the validity of our proposal. The p-ary Choquet-based multicriteria decision-making model realizes customer-oriented product design scheme selection by systematically analyzing customer preferences and bridging the gap between products that are emotionally recognized by customers and those that exhibit excellent performance in terms of functionality and cost.