Modelling of quality function deployment planning with resource allocation

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a well-known customer-oriented methodology, which is widely used to assist decision making in product design and development in various types of production. Determining how and to what extent certain characteristics or technical attributes (TAs) of products are to be met, with a view to gaining a higher level of overall customer satisfaction, is a key success factor in product design and development. An operational QFD planning problem with resource allocation is considered in this paper. The aim is to plan the attainment of TAs by allocating resources among the TAs with a view to achieving maximized overall customer satisfaction. Taking into account the technical and resource constraints, and the impact of the correlation among TAs, the operational QFD planning with resource allocation is formulated as a linear program and solved by a heuristics-combined Simplex Method. An overall procedure is presented to help a design team to implement this QFD design planning with resource allocation in practice. This model can bridge the gap and conflicts between the design targets at the strategic level, and resource allocations in the part deployment and operational process planning level.