Research Issues in Robust QFD

Quality function deployment (QFD) provides a specific approach for ensuring quality throughout each stage of the product development and production process. Since the focus of QFD is placed on the early stage of product development, the uncertainty in the input information of QFD is inevitable. If the uncertainty is neglected, the QFD analysis results are likely to be misleading. It is necessary to equip practitioners with a new QFD methodology that can model, analyze, and dampen the effects of the uncertainty and variability in a systematic manner. Robust QFD is an extended version of QFD methodology, which is robust to the uncertainty of the input information and the resulting variability of the QFD output. This paper discusses recent research issues in Robust QFD. The major issues are related with the determination of overall priority, robustness evaluation, robust prioritization, and web-based Robust QFD optimizer. Our recent research results on the issues are presented, and some of future research topics are suggested.