Quality Function Deployment in Airport Terminals: The Airport of Porto Alegre Case

Abstract

Since years 90, the Brazilian air market suffered major changes, starting with the opening of the market and culminating with increasing competition in the airline market. These factors, coupled with the country's economic stability, and the ease to credit, generated a significant increase in demand in the last decade. Current infrastructure of airports could not keep up with the growing market, which led to the situation faced daily in Brazilian airports: crowded waiting rooms and constant delays in flights. Within this context, this work aims to evaluate the quality of services within Porto Alegre Airport/Salgado Filho. Quality function Deployment tool (QFD) is used as the main tool for evaluating the levels of quality. The requirements have been identified and prioritized with the application of market research, and subsequently analyzed by the statistical tool Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The result was the construction of a survey instrument to assess airports, statistically valid, and a methodology to weave strategic guidelines for implementation of improvements. 

A three-dimensional house: extending quality function deployment in two organizations

“…In their research "availability of ATM cash machines and exchange office" had the highest importance degree and weight among other customers' wants, However, in the present research, "displaying flights info" has the highest importance degree and "convenient access to the airport" has the highest weight in the airport section. In the same way, the present study has some differences from the research conducted by Weber et al (2013). They implemented QFD in the Airport of Porto Alegre, considering 10 customers' wants and 21 corrective activities.…”

“…2.2 QFD in services industry QFD is a case-based approach and several research studies in this scope have studied real-life cases. The QFD case studies were conducted on industry (González et al, 2004), hotel industry (Chang and Chen, 2011;Shaojing and Hong-Bin, 2016), library services (Chen and Chou, 2011), healthcare (Gao and Zhang, 2016;Saadon et al, 2015;Lee et al, 2015;Chou et al, 2014), train services (Khorshidi et al, 2016), IT planning (Büyüközkan and Güleryüz, 2015), logistic services (Baki et al, 2009), airport services (Weber et al, 2013;Kayapınar and Erginel, 2017), airline services (Wang, 2007;Liang, 2010), etc. The literature review of QDF shows that there is no research that employs QFD in two different organizations simultaneously.…”

“…Some researchers used QFD or combination of QFD with SERVQUAL method to improve quality in airport section. Weber et al (2013) evaluated the service quality in Airport of Porto Alegre located in Brazil. They used the QFD to evaluate the service quality in the airport terminal and demonstrated the relationships between customers' wants and corrective activities.…”

“…In the literature review, some of research studies use QFD in airline section (Liang, 2010;Wang, 2007) an airport section (Weber et al, 2013;Kayapınar and Erginel, 2017). Kayapınar and Erginel (2017) used SERVQUAL and fuzzy QFD methods just in the airport service and ignored the airline service which interconnects with the airport section.…”

Integrating machine learning with QFD for selecting functional requirements in construction automation

“…FA is a classical statistical technique that does not have the difficulties encountered in ANP or fuzzy logic, but Subbaiah et al [2] give preference to PCA over FA due to the weakness of the latter in handling strongly correlated requirements. Weber et al [12] have explored PCA in features prioritization of an airport, but, for feature selection, they have not used this state-of-the-art machine learning technique to establish the criteria for determining the optimum number of FRs.…”