Selection in Product Plan Alternatives Based on PPHoQ and Stochastic Variable

To reflect the complexity of real-life situation and to depict the distribution of engineering characteristic (EC) values associated with each alternative in an effective way, firstly, according to the theory of product planning house of quality (PPHoQ), interval linguistic variables are used by the customer representatives to describe their preferences over the customer requirements (CRs). The aggregation of the correlations between CRs and ECs and the autocorrelations of ECs yield the importance degrees of ECs. Secondly, the gaps between the target values and the optimal ones of ECs are analyzed to calculate the expectations of population distributions for alternative plans. Thirdly, the idea of stochastic dominance theory is introduced to construct the dominance matrix via pairwise comparisons between the alternatives. Finally, the comprehensive evaluation indexes of each alternative are determined as per the importance of ECs, the dominance matrix, and the assignment priority matrix. The proposed method is applied in the product development of jaw crushers, in which five CRs and five ECs are determined by the project team, and the alternatives are selected through the house of quality in product plan and stochastic variables. The outcome of the application validates the proposed approach.