Integrated weight assessment system using a Markovian model for characterizing customer evaluation

A prioritization of customer needs is necessary when designing process or product in order to conduct trade-offs between the needs. The nature of the weight assessment system employed for prioritization has a direct bearing on the subsequent stages of the design process. Most weight assessment methods reported in the research community have been developed from the perspective of either customers or a design engineer. This article proposes an integrated weight assessment system by synthesizing the perceptions of combining the perspectives of both parties, the customer and a design engineer, in such a way that uncertainty of human perceptions can be modeled using the concepts of fuzzy sets and Monte Carlo simulation. The proposed hybrid weight assessment model achieves an efficient characterization of customer opinion by incorporating the dependencies between serial evaluations of an attribute by the customer during the entropy method using a Markovian model. A model is presented and a numerical example is discussed.