AN INTEGRATED FUZZY APPROACH FOR DETERMINING ENGINEERING CHARACTERISTICS IN CONCRETE INDUSTRY
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Abstract
This paper deals with the modeling of conceptual knowledge to capture the major customer requirements effectively and to transform these requirements systematically into the relevant design requirements. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a well-known planning and problem-solving tool for translating customer needs (CNs) into the engineering characteristics (ECs) and can be employed for this modeling. In this study, an integrated methodology is presented to rank ECs for implementing QFD in a fuzzy environment. The proposed methodology uses fuzzy weighted average method as a fuzzy group decision making approach to fuse multiple preference rankings for determining the weights of the customer needs. It adopts a fuzzy Analytic Network Process (ANP) approach which enables the consideration of inner dependencies in a cluster as well as the interdependencies between the clusters to determine the importance of ECs. The proposed approach is illustrated through a case study in ready-mixed concrete industry.