Quality function deployment (QFD) is becoming a widely used customer-oriented approach and tool in product design. Taking into account the "nancial factors and uncertainties in the product design process, this paper deals with a fuzzy formulation combined with a genetic-based interactive approach to QFD planning. By introducing new concepts of planned degree, actual achieved degree, actual primary costs required and actual planned costs, two types of fuzzy optimisation models are discussed in this paper. These models consider not only the overall customer satisfaction, but also the enterprise satisfaction with the costs committed to the product. With the interactive approach, the best balance between enterprise satisfaction and overall customer satisfaction can be obtained, and the preferred solutions under di!erent business criteria can be achieved through human}computer nteraction.

Based on the introduction of some new concepts of semifoasible direction, Feasible Degree (FDl) of semifeasible direction,feasible degree (FD2) of illegal points'belonging to'feasible domain, etc, this paper proposed a new fuzzy method for formulating and evaluating illegal points and three new kinds of evaluation functions and developed a special Hybrid Genetic Algorithm (HGA) with penalty function and gradient direction! search for nonlinear rogramming problems. It uses mutation along the weighted gradient direction as its main operator and uses arithmetic combinatorial crossover only in the later generation process, Simulation of some examples show that this method is effective.

A brief Summary on and comprchnsivc undcrstanding of fuzzy optimization is presented. This Summary is madc on aspcets of fuzzy modclling and fuzzy optimization. classification and formulation for the fllzzy optimization problems. models and nlcthods The importance of interpretation of the probhlcm and formulation of the optimal sohltion in fuzzy sense arc mphasizcd in the Summry of fhe fuzzy optimization

Quality function deployment (QFD) is becoming a widely used customer-driven approach and tool in product design. The inherent fuzziness in QFD modelling makes fuzzy regression more appealing than classical statistical tools. A new fuzzy regression-based mathematical programming approach for QFD product planning is presented. First, fuzzy regression theories with symmetric and nonsymmetric triangular fuzzy coefficients are discussed to identify the relational functions between engineering characteristics and customer requirements and among engineering characteristics. By embedding the relational functions obtained by fuzzy regression, a mathematical programming model is developed to determine targets of engineering characteristics, taking into consideration the fuzziness, financial factors and customer expectations among the competitors in product development process. The proposed modelling approach can help design team assess relational functions in QFD effectively and reconcile tradeoffs among the various degree of customer satisfaction and determine a set of the level of attainment of engineering characteristics for the new/improved product towards a higher customer expectation within design budget. The comparison results under symmetric and non-symmetric cases and the simulation analysis are made when the approach is applied to a quality improvement problem for an emulsification dynamite packing machine.

In the global manufacturing environment, decisions involving production activities and distribution should be made in an integrative manner for substantial savings in the logistics costs. An integrated decision on production assignment, lot sizing, transportation, and order quantity for a multiple-suppliers/multiple-destinations logistics network in a global manufacturing system is discussed in this paper. The integrated decision process can be viewed as a two-layer decision. The first layer is the combined decisions of production assignment and lot sizing (APLS-M), while the second layer is the combined decisions of transportation and order quantity determination (TOQ-M). A two-layer decomposition method combining two heuristics is hence developed to solve the integrated decision model (IDM-M). An assignment heuristic and a transportation heuristic are designed to solve the decision layers APLS-M and TOQ-M, respectively. Simulations were conducted on a practical example in an electronics manufacturing enterprise together with different sizes of problems. The results indicate that the two-layer decomposition method with heuristics is effective and provides a practical way to solve medium and large-scale integrated decision problems.