Configuration optimization of product-service system design requirements based on hesitant information axiom

Abstract

Product-service system (PSS) has attracted attention of manufacturers to shift from product-providing to solution-providing, which is a marketable set of products and services. The existing researches emphasize the fulfillment of individualized customer requirements through different PSS configurations. The PSS planning phase is of high importance in generating conceptual schemes, which translates customer requirements (CRs) to design requirements (DRs). In this paper, a systematic decision-making approach based on QFD is put forward aiming to configure the PSS design requirements (DRs). To address the uncertainty and hesitancy in QFD modeling, a hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTSs) is applied to elicit the experts’ linguistic preferences in evaluating the importance of CRs and the relationships between CRs and DRs. To dealing with the group decision-making problems concerning the HFLTSs, the min-upper operator and the max-lower operator assemble the experts’ evaluation results into a linguistic interval, and then the numerical results can be obtained by using the 2-tuple linguistic representation model and the interval preference degree computation. A non-linear 0-1 programming model is proposed to select the target DRs’ specifications for maximizing customer satisfaction under cost constraint. In order to objectively determine the satisfaction degree of each optional specification of DR, the information axiom is introduced to construct the objective function via information content computation. To deal with the qualitative DRs, HFLTSs and information axiom are combined and hesitant information axiom (HIA) is proposed. Finally, a DRs optimization model is established using HIA and the imprecision method. A case study is carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the optimal PSS planning approach developed.