Research on determining the key technology of new product plan and design

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a systematic approach that captures customer requirements and translates them, through house of quality (HOQ), into technology characteristics of the product. QFD is an available tool to develop the new product. In this paper, we use QFD to determine the key technology of new product plan and design. We firstly use the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to determine the importance of the customer requirements. Then, as the relationships of customer requirements and technical requirements, technical requirements and part characteristics in QFD are uncertain, nonlinear and fuzzy, BP neural network to determine these relationships for QFD is presented, and establishes a QFD product planning model and a QFD part deployment model both based on BP artificial neural network. We put the importance of the customer requirements into the two QFD model, and obtain the importance of the part characteristics, and then determine the key technology. Finally, a case study of new product development is provided to illustrate the application of the presented method.