Fuzzy logic approach to prioritise engineering characteristics in quality function deployment (FL-QFD) N. Rajam Ramasamy V. Selladurai Article information:To cite this document: N.If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.Abstract Quality function deployment (QFD) is a proven tool for process and product development, which translates the voice of customer (VoC) into engineering characteristics (EC), and prioritises the ECs, based on the customer's requirements. Conventional QFD evaluates these targets for crisp weights of the customer attributes (CA), identified from the VoCs. The VoCs are not crisp and generally exhibit a well-defined distribution. Crisp weights assigned to non-crisp CAs can lead to wrong prioritisation of the EC. In the past, fuzzy numbers have been used to represent the imprecise nature of these judgements and to define more appropriately the relationship between EC and CA. This paper proposes fuzzy logic-quality function deployment (FL-QFD) -the use of fuzzy logic principles in QFD. It is an innovative method of determining optimum rating of ECs by simulating the QFD matrix for randomized CA rating in the fuzzied range. The rule-based knowledge system defines the relationship between the ECs and the CAs. The flexible manufacturing system (FMS) design problem investigated is presented to show the application of the proposed model. The results are compared and examined to study the effect of the CA on prioritising the EC. The paper addresses the issue of defining non-crisp customer attributes in the QFD, and offers practical help to an individual intending to further investigate the proposed model.

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