Engineering characteristics prioritization for quality function deployment by using CRITIC and cumulative prospect theory with extended hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a powerful approach for improving product quality that can transform customer requirements (CRs) into engineering characteristics (ECs) during product manufacturing. The limitations of traditional QFD methods lead to imprecise quantification of CRs and difficulty in accurately mapping customer needs. To address these issues, this paper introduces an innovative QFD approach that integrates extended hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (EHFLTSs), CRITIC, and cumulative prospect theory. The method expresses the subjectivity and hesitancy of decision makers when evaluating the relationship between ECs and CRs using EHFLTSs, considering the conflicts among CRs. The CRITIC is used to comprehensively evaluate the comparison strength and conflict between indicators, and the cumulative prospect theory is utilized to derive the prioritization of ECs. A case study is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.