Fuzzy eco-design product development by using quality function deployment

Recently, resource optimization (energy and material) and environmental issues in life-cycle context are taken very seriously by both the general public and government agencies. Also, some governments have set up official eco-labeling schemes, which are used to inform consumers of Eco (ecology and economic) design products. In the past, several environmental impact analyses and evaluation tools are significantly developed to apply on the Eco design products. However, these Eco design products are not favorable in the market place as expected even though they sound more environmental friendly and economical. This may be due to they are focused solely on environmental impact analysis without regarding to the customer need and the cost consideration. As a procedure to incorporate customer needs into product concepts in product planning, Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a proven methodology to achieve total customer satisfaction. Therefore, a fuzzy theoretic modeling approach to the Eco QFD is developed and illustrated to aid the design team in choosing target levels for engineering characteristics based on the environmental concern in this research. Unlike two valued Boolean logic, fuzzy logic is multi-valued. It deals with degrees of membership and degrees of truth. The Eco design product development problem was formulated as a fuzzy multi-objective model based on the QFD planning. This model not only considers the overall customer satisfaction, but also enterprise satisfaction with the environment committed to the product. With the interactive approach, the best balance between environmental satisfaction and overall customer satisfaction can be obtained. Finally, a case study illustrating the appliance of the proposed model is also given.