Assessment of customer´s and technical requirements through a fuzzy logic-based method

The foundation of the house of quality (HOQ) is the belief that products should be designed to reflect customers desires. It is often used to identify the relationships between requirements based on different viewpoints. There are two issues in analyzing these requirements using HOQ. First, requirements are often described informally using vague terms, which makes it difficult to meet customer´s needs. Second, identifying relationships between requirements is often time consuming. To address these issues, we have developed a fuzzy logic-based extension to HOQ for capturing imprecise requirements to both facilitate communication of team members and have a formal representation of requirements. Based on this representation, we developed a heuristic inference scheme to reason about the implicit relationships between requirements. We illustrate our approach using a textile mill supply business application