A hybrid QFD-AHP methodology and an application for heating systems in Turkey

Abstract

Selection of the heating system is based on many characteristics from the customer side. Operating cost, comfort, ease of use and aesthetic of the systems are some of the most important ones of these characteristics. In this article, data is collected primarily for the implementation of quality house. With these data, customer requirements are listed and defined in terms of degree of importance from the customer side. Then, the relationship between customer requirements and technical requirements are described. Also, column weights are calculated according to the defined relations. Finally, the results obtained using a quality house is integrated with Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology for system selection. Then results are interpreted. The main contribution of this paper is to determine the best heating system selection using the relationship between customer and technical requirements. To the authors’ knowledge, this will be the first study which uses the integrated QFD-AHP method for heating system selection.