ANN-Based Fuzzy Reasoning to Determine the Importance of Technical Requirements in QFD

During the product planning phase in QFD (Quality Function Deployment), the final importance of the technical requirements is key to optimize the whole HoQ (House of Quality) and to make deployment decision for the next stage. In the paper, the limitations of traditional methods are analyzed; by using the built product planning HoQ and the available linguistic terms based experts' knowledge, and with the artificial neural network introduced to realize neural network-based fuzzy reasoning, the final importance of the technical requirements is evaluated reasonably and effectively.