Mixed Integer Linear Programming Model to Determine the Optimal Levels of Technical Attributes in QFD under Multi-Segment Market

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a widely adopted customer-oriented product development methodology by analyzing customer requirements. It is a main activity in QFD planning process to determine the optimal values of the technical attributes (TAs) so as to achieve the customer requirements (CRs) from the House of Quality (HoQ). In most of the previous research, all the TAs in QFD are assumed to have either continuous or discrete values. In the real world applications, the continuous TAs and the discrete TAs are often mixed in QFD. In this paper, a mixed integer linear programming model is formulated to obtain the optimal values for the continuous TAs and the discrete TAs in QFD planning as well as Branch and Bound (B and B) algorithm is proposed as the solution approach. Finally, the proposed model and solution approach are illustrated with an office chair under multi-segment market, and the sensitivity analysis is performed to study how the proposed model and its solutions respond to the variation for the two elements which are budget and CRs' weights.