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 thecustomer side. Operating cost, comfort, ease of use and aesthetic of the systemsare some of the most important ones of these characteristics. In this article, datais collected primarily for the implementation of quality house. With these data,customer requirements are listed and defined in terms of degree of importancefrom the customer side. Then, the relationship between customer requirementsand technical requirements are described. Also, column weights are calculatedaccording to the defined relations. Finally, the results obtained using a qualityhouse is integrated with Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology forsystem selection. Then results are interpreted. The main contribution of thispaper is to determine the best heating system selection using the relationshipbetween customer and technical requirements. To the authors’ knowledge, thiswill be the first study which uses the integrated QFD-AHP method for heatingsystem selection.