Reduction of complex design problem based on decomposition of HOQ matrix

Considering the different characteristics of the relation matrix of customer requirements (CR) and engineering performances (EP) and the correlation matrix of engineering performances, a decomposition approach for the house of quality (HOQ) matrix is proposed. First, on the basis of the correlation matrix of engineering performances, the fuzzy cluster method is applied to group the engineering performances under certain threshold and the number of the final modules is then determined. Based on above and conforming to the unique criterion and maximization criterion of the satisfaction which mean that every customer requirement should be included in one and only one of the modules and the sum of the relation coefficients included in the modules should be maximum, the decomposition of the relation matrix of the customer requirements and the engineering performances is converted into an integer optimization question subject to certain constraints, thus complex design problem based on HOQ matrix is decomposed into the design of several simple modules.