Optimal new product design using quality function deployment with empirical value functions

The house of quality (HOQ) has been widely proposed as a method for capturing the voice of the customer (VOC) when developing requirements for new products. The methodology has lacked a formal mechanism for trading off customer preferences with technical feasibility and economic reality. We propose a non-linear mathematical program for determining the optimal engineering specifications during new product development as a function of elicited customer value functions, engineering development and production costs and development time constraints. The model is shown to be computationally feasible for realistic-size problems and to outperform heuristic approaches. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.