Abstract: Considering that the relationship between customer needs (CNs) and product engineering characteristics (ECs) in House of Quality (HoQ) model has the characteristics of “small data” and “poor information”, the grey relational analysis is introduced to calculate the importance degree of ECs. Taking into account the impact of product development cost, technical realizing difficulties, market competition requirements and the actual fuzziness of product development cost restraint on the optimum product design during the process of product design, a fuzzy hybrid integer programming model is established to realize the optimum design level for ECs. Finally, an application to improve the ECs of the intelligent cellphones illustrates the effectiveness and practicality of proposed model.

Key words: HoQ model, engineering characteristics, grey relational analysis, fuzzy mixed integer programming