In the traditional research of customer survey, the basic research methods are interview or questionnaire. For the relevant data obtained, researchers can use a variety of analysis methods for comparative analysis, so as to get important research conclusions. At this stage, with the improvement of online platform and technology level, there are many online reviews of products. The main reason for the popularity of online reviews is that they can contain a lot of customer expectation information and customer opinion requirements. If we summarize, sort out, compare and analyze these comments, we can get important analysis results, which can fully show the needs of customers and play a very important reference role in decision-making. However, a lot of research on this aspect, for the prediction of customer demand is still not deep enough, there is a lot of room for improvement. Based on this development status, this paper develops and designs an online review content mining system based on opinion mining and fuzzy time series method. Opinion mining can effectively mine the important customer needs hidden behind the online review content, as well as the different weights of various customer needs. Fuzzy time series method can predict the future importance weights based on the mined information. At the same time, a case study is taken to compare the effectiveness and feasibility of this method with exponential smoothing method, simple moving average method and fuzzy moving average method in the online review analysis of electric iron. It is found that the method studied and designed in this paper has higher accuracy and reliability.

Differential evolution (DE) is a simple but powerful evolutionary algorithm, which has been widely and successfully used in many areas. In this paper, an impulsive control method is introduced to the DE framework, and the impulsive DE (IpDE) is proposed for improving the performance of DE. The impulsive control operation instantly moves the individuals which do not update for continuous pre-defined generations to a desired state based on the individuals with better fitness values in the current population. This way, IpDE controls individuals' positions in the space domain according to the stagnation status of the population. In order to validate the effectiveness of IpDE, the presented framework is applied to the original DE algorithms, as well as several state-of-the-art DE variants. Experimental results exhibit that IpDE is a simple but effective framework to improve the performance of the studied DE algorithms.

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a widely adopted customer-oriented methodology to assist in product design and development. In a traditional QFD-based product planning process, the importance weights of customer requirements (CRs) in house of quality are obtained by analyzing and generalizing the requirements of various customers, and the purpose of the subsequent optimal setting of engineering characteristics (ECs) and process parameters is to achieve a higher level of overall customer satisfaction (OCS). However, nowadays customers' requirements are increasingly diversified and customers usually have heterogeneous preferences. Consequently, customers in a product market may have different purchasing choice behaviors and satisfaction criteria toward a new product. Therefore, heterogeneity of CRs should be considered in QFD-based optimization models to describe the relationship between CRs and ECs and to model the OCS. In this paper, a novel QFD-based product planning approach is proposed for a product market with diversified CRs by integrating consumer choice behavior analysis. The contributions of this paper include: 1) customers' purchase choice rules are introduced into QFD-based product planning process to simulate the purchase behavior of a customer toward a product; 2) two new QFD-based optimization models under deterministic and multinomial logit consumer choice rules are proposed to help firms improve the product quality under environment of diversified CRs; 3) the established model under deterministic consumer choice rule is transformed into an equivalent linear model to facilitate the solving process; and 4) the established optimization models are further extended for products with both continuous and discrete target values of ECs.

Rough set (RS)- and particle swarm optimization (PSO)- based adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) approaches are proposed to generate customer satisfaction models in affective design that address fuzzy and nonlinear relationships between affective responses and design attributes. The RS theory is adopted to reduce the number of fuzzy rules generated using ANFIS and simplify the structure of ANFIS. PSO is employed to determine the parameter settings of an ANFIS from which customer satisfaction models with better modeling accuracy can be generated. A case study of mobile phone affec- tive design is used to illustrate the proposed approaches.

The success of a new product is very much related to the customer satisfaction level of the product. Therefore, it is important to estimate the customer satisfaction level of a new product in its design stage. Quality function deployment is commonly used to develop customer satisfaction models for product design. Relationships between customer satisfaction and design attributes are highly fuzzy and nonlinear, but these relationship characteristics cannot be captured by existing customer satisfaction models. In this paper, we propose a novel chaos-based fuzzy regression (FR) approach with which fuzzy customer satisfaction models with second- and/or higher order terms, and interaction terms can be developed. The proposed approach uses a chaos optimization algorithm to generate the polynomial structures of customer satisfaction models. Thereafter, it employs an FR method to determine the fuzzy coefficients of the individual terms of models. To illustrate and validate the proposed approach, it is applied in the development of a customer satisfaction model for a mobile phone design. Five validation tests are conducted to compare modeling results from the chaos-based FR with those from statistical regression, FR, and fuzzy least-squares regression. Results of the validation tests show that the proposed approach outperforms the other three approaches in terms of mean relative errors and variance of errors and customer satisfaction models with second- and/or higher order terms, and interaction terms can be developed effectively using the proposed chaos-based FR approach.

In this paper, process conditions of epoxy dispensing processes are determined by the proposed genetic algorithm based neural fuzzy networks, which consists of two tasks: a) the approach of neural fuzzy networks, which was shown to be better than the other existing approaches, is proposed to develop models in relating between process parameters and quality characteristics for the epoxy dispensing processes; b) the approach of genetic algorithm is used to determine process parameters with respect to pre-defined quality requirements based on the developed neural fuzzy network models. The results indicate that, based on the proposed genetic algorithm based neural fuzzy network, estimated process parameters can achieve specified requirements of microchip encapsulations with high and robust qualities.

Fuzzy regression is a commonly used approach for modeling manufacturing processes in which the availability of experimental data is limited. Fuzzy regression can address fuzzy nature of experimental data in which fuzziness is not avoidable while carrying experiments. However, fuzzy regression can only address linearity in manufacturing process systems, but nonlinearity, which is unavoidable in the process, cannot be addressed. In this paper, an evolutionary fuzzy regression which integrates the mechanism of a fuzzy regression and genetic programming is proposed to generate manufacturing process models. It intends to overcome the deficiency of the fuzzy regression, which cannot address nonlinearities in manufacturing processes. The evolutionary fuzzy regression uses genetic programming to generate the structural form of the manufacturing process model based on tree representation which can address both linearity and nonlinearities in manufacturing processes. Then it uses a fuzzy regression to determine outliers in experimental data sets. By using experimental data excluding the outliers, the fuzzy regression can determine fuzzy coefficients which indicate the contribution and fuzziness of each term in the structural form of the manufacturing process model. To evaluate the effectiveness of the evolutionary fuzzy regression, a case study regarding modeling of epoxy dispensing process is carried out.

Modeling of manufacturing processes is important because it enables manufacturers to understand the process behavior and determine the optimum operating conditions of the process for a high yield, low cost and robust operation. However, existing techniques in modeling manufacturing processes cannot address the whole common issues in developing models for manufacturing processes: a) manufacturing processes are usually nonlinear in nature; b) a small amount of experimental data is only available for developing manufacturing process models; c) outliers often exist in experimental data; d) explicit models in a polynomial form are often preferred by manufacturing process engineers; and e) models with satisfactory prediction accuracy are required. In this paper, a modeling algorithm, namely, the particle swarm optimization-based fuzzy regression (PSO-FR) approach, is proposed to generate fuzzy nonlinear regression models, which seek to address all of the common issues in developing models for manufacturing processes. The PSO-FR first employs the operations of particle swarm optimization to generate the structures of the process models in nonlinear polynomial form, and then it employs a fuzzy coefficient generator to identify outliers in the original experimental data. Fuzzy coefficients of the process models are determined by the fuzzy coefficient generator in which the experimental data excluding the outliers is used. The effectiveness of the PSO-FR approach is evaluated by modeling the manufacturing process liquid epoxy molding process which is a commonly used technology for microchip encapsulation in electronic packaging. Results were compared with those based on the commonly used modeling methods. It was found that PSO-FR can achieve better goodness-of-fitness than other methods. Also, the prediction accuracy of the model developed based on the PSO-FR is better than the other methods.

Even if genetic programming (GP) has rich literature in development of polynomial models for manufacturing processes, the polynomial models may contain redundant terms which may cause the overfitted models. In other words, those models have good accuracy on training data sets but poor accuracy on untrained data sets. In this paper, a mechanism which aims at avoiding overfitting is proposed based on a statistical method, backward elimination, which intends to eliminate insignificant terms in polynomial models. By modeling a solder paste dispenser for electronic manufacturing, results show that the insignificant terms in the polynomial model can be eliminated by the proposed mechanism. Results also show that the polynomial model generated by the proposed GP can achieve better predictions than the existing methods.

In affective product design, one of the main goals is to maximize customers' affective satisfaction by optimizing design variables of a new product. To achieve this, a model in relating customers' affective responses and design variables of a new product is required to be developed based on customers' survey data. However, previous research on modelling the relationship between affective response and design variables cannot address the development of explicit models either involving nonlinearity or fuzziness, which exist in customers' survey data. In this paper, an evolutionary fuzzy regression approach is proposed to generate explicit models to represent this nonlinear and fuzzy relationship between affective responses and design variables. In the approach, genetic programming is used to construct branches of a tree representing structures of a model where the nonlinearity of the model can be addressed. Fuzzy coefficients of the model, which is represented by the tree, are determined based on a fuzzy regression algorithm. As a result, the fuzzy nonlinear regression model can be obtained to relate affective responses and design variables.

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a well-known customer driven system and tool for planning and managing new product development. House of quality (HOQ) is used to translate customer requirements (CRs) into each stage of a product development in QFD. In the conventional QFD model, constant coefficients are employed to present the relationships between “What matrix” and “How matrix” and among “How matrixes". In order to break the hindrance of the representation of simple linear function in the structure of HOQ, an integrative approach considering Kano model into QFD planning are employed, and processes are performed in uncertain and vague environments. Therefore, a fuzzy multi-objective model (FMOQFD-Kano) is proposed to reconcile the tradeoff between customer satisfaction and cost. Not only customer satisfaction is taken into account, but also cost is considered in the proposed model. Moreover, a fuzzy solution approach is applied to solve the model for preferred solutions under different alpha-levels, which can give decision-maker more choices to cater for uncertain environment. An example is presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposed model.

Uncertainty in manufacturing processes is caused both by randomness, as in material properties, and by fuzziness, as in the inexact knowledge. Previous research has seldom considered these two types of uncertainty when modeling manufacturing processes. In this paper, a hybrid fuzzy least-squares regression (HFLSR) approach to modeling manufacturing processes, which does take into consideration these two types of uncertainty, is proposed and described, and a new form of weighted fuzzy arithmetic is introduced to develop the hybrid fuzzy least-squares regression method. The proposed HFLSR approach not only features the capability of dealing with the two types of uncertainty, but also addresses the consideration of replication of responses in experiments. To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to process modeling, it was applied to the modeling solder paste dispensing process. Modeling results were compared with those based on statistical regression and fuzzy linear regression. It was found that the accuracy of prediction based on the HFLSR is slightly better than that based on statistical regression and much better than that based on the Peters fuzzy regression.

Determination of the initial process parameters for fluid dispensing process is a highly skilled task and is usually based on skilled engineers’ intuitive sense acquired through long-term experience rather than on a knowledge-based approach. In the face of global competition, the current trial-and -error practice is inadequate. In this paper, a rule-based system is developed to aid the determination of initial process parameters for fluid dispensing process by the genetic algorithm. Based on the rule based system, a set of ranges of process parameters can be recommended with a pre-defined quality requirement of microchip encapsulation. The preliminary validation test of the rule-based system has indicated that it can determine a set of ranges of initial process parameters for fluid dispensing process effectively, from which quality requirement can be achieved without totally relying on engineers’ experience.

In today's competitive business environment, it is important that customers are able to obtain their preferred items in the shops they visit, particularly for convenience store chains such as 7–Eleven where popular items are expected to be readily available on the shelves of the stores for buyers. To minimize the cost of running such store chains, it is essential that stocks be kept to a minimum and at the same time large varieties of popular items are available for customers. In this respect, the replenishment system needs to be able to cope with the taxing demands of minimal inventory but at the same time keeping large varieties of needed items. This paper proposes a replenishment system which is able to respond to the fluctuating demands of customers and provide a timely supply of needed items in a cost–effective way. The proposed system embraces the principle of fuzzy logic which is able to deal with uncertainties by virtue of its fuzzy rules reasoning mechanism, thereby leveraging the responsiveness of the entire replenishment system for the chain stores. To validate the feasibility of the approach, a case study has been conducted in an emulated environment with promising results.