Abstract: Faced with the difficulty of automobile quality and chaotic rankings of vehicles, a comprehensive evaluation model on economy of quality of automobile using extended VIKOR is developed to assist car consumers in decision-making of purchasing. The economy of quality indexes including product quality, after-sales quality and total ownership cost are addressed. Due to multiple sources of evaluation information and uncertainty of certain indexes, the mixed types of indexes including crisp value, interval number and linguistic variables are introduced to the evaluation framework. The rough set-based attribute reduction technique is employed to delete the redundant criteria, which facilitates key indexes establishment. According to the European distance analysis for mixed indexes, the anti-entropy-based technique is used to obtain criteria weights, and the best vehicle alternative is recommended with the minimum group utility value. The case study verifies that the proposed method contributes to intelligent recommendation for vehicle consumers. A comparative analysis indicates that car users tend to select cheaper vehicles without considering operation cost. However, when taking the total ownership cost into account, they prefer to choose vehicles with top priority concerning economy of quality rather than cheap ones, which caters to practical scenarios.

Key words: automobile product, service quality, total ownership cost, economy of quality, extended VIKOR