HOQ's implicit requirements assessment: A fuzzy logic-based method

The House of Quality (HOQ) is used to identify the relationships between products/services requirements based on the perceptions of customers and experts from a multidisciplinary team. The foundation of the house of quality is the belief that products should be designed to reflect customers' desires and taste. There are two issues in analyzing these requirements using HOQ. First, requirements are often described informally using vague terms; this makes it difficult to meet customer's needs. Second, identifying relationships between requirements is often time consuming, thus, arriving at a group consensus on some relationships between requirements could be cumbersome. To address these issues, we have developed a fuzzy logic-based extension to HOQ for capturing imprecise requirements. We developed a heuristic inference scheme to reason about the implicit relationships between requirements. A textile mill supply business application is used to illustrate our approach.