New Approach for Quality Function Deployment Using an Extended CoCoSo Method with Spherical Fuzzy Sets

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a customer-driven quality management tool that can improve system quality, promote innovation, and enhance the core competitiveness of enterprises. Nonetheless, the traditional QFD method has defects in handling the experts’ assessments, measuring customer requirement importance, and prioritizing engineering characteristics, which affect its efficiency and limit its application in the real world. In this study, a new QFD approach based on spherical fuzzy sets (SFSs) and a combined compromise solution (CoCoSo) method is proposed to overcome the shortcomings associated with the traditional QFD. To be specific, the linguistic relationship assessments between the customer requirements and engineering characteristics provided by the experts were described by the SFSs, the relative weights of the customer requirements were obtained via the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method, and the importance ranking orders of the engineering characteristics were determined with an improved CoCoSo method. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed QFD approach are illustrated by an empirical case of accommodation service design. The results show that the new QFD approach provides a useful and practical way to represent the relationship assessment information of experts and determine the priority of engineering characteristics in product development.