HOQ´s implicit requirements assessment: a fuzzy logic-based method

The House of Quality (HOQ) is used to identify the relationships between products/services requirements based on the perceptions of customers and experts from a multidisciplinary team. The foundation of the house of quality is the belief that products should be designed to reflect customers´ desires and taste. There are two issues in analyzing these requirements using HOQ. First, requirements are often described informally using vague terms; this makes it difficult to meet customer´s needs. Second, identifying relationships between requirements is often time consuming, thus, arriving at a group consensus on some relationships between requirements could be cumbersome. To address these issues, we have developed a fuzzy logic-based extension to HOQ for capturing imprecise requirements. We developed a heuristic inference scheme to reason about the implicit relationships between requirements. A textile mill supply business application is used to illustrate our approach