METHODS FOR MEASURING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION IN THE DESIGN PROCESS

Mirko Djapic

Abstract: In the design process, the designer makes decisions under uncertainty, contradiction and ignorance conditions. Are these decisions correct and to what extent? How much do they influence customer's satisfaction? These are only some of the questions the designers face all time. These dilemmas appear more in early phases of the design process. The explicit objectives of this paper is improvement of design decision making process in such a way that in same time when designer made a decision he or she show result that decision on customer satisfaction. In order to solve above problems, the paper describes the method, which enables integrated use of the axiomatic approach to designing, and the Taguchi method of robust design. This approach implies the modelling of the development process as an evidence-reasoning network based on uncertain evidence described via belief functions of (Dempster - Shafer theory). The paper starts with base concept of belief functions and valuation based system or evidential reasoning system for representation and reasoning based on uncertainty. After that we introduce coefficient of relative decrease of uncertainty in design process and new graphical representation of system architecture - the evidence networks. On the end we presents a method for measuring customer satisfaction in the design process in uncertainty condition using evidence networks.

Keywords: axiomatic design, belief functions, Taguchi, evidential network

DOI:

Recieved: 19.06.2007  Accepted: 30.08.2007  UDC: 658.512.2:658.89

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