Abstract

Manufacturers seek to improve the quality of their products while reducing costs and decreasing production time. In this paper, we describe a ‘design for X’ methodology that addresses multiple issues that contribute to overall product quality. This methodology builds on the popular House of Quality symbolic construct by using customer preferences and a transformation of the customer -engineering relationship matrix to form constraints on the feasible design space. Multiattribute Utility Theory, a decision analysis tool, provides the mathematical basis to model competing design goals simultaneously and to make rational decisions to affect overall design improvement. When coupled with the constraints, this construct completes a mathematical programming model of the concurrent design problem. With an example, we demonstrate how to extract qualitative information from the House of Quality, formulate the model, and solve it to determine the best design — defined as the optimum combination of multiple quality attributes. This methodology provides a formal framework for decision making in design, allowing manufacturers to Design for Quality.

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