Integrating rough set theory with customer satisfaction to construct a novel approach for mining product design rules

When users choose a product, they consider the emotional experience triggered by the product form. In view of the fact that traditional kansei engineering can not effectively reflect the complex and changeable psychological factors of users, and it has not explored the complex relationship between customer satisfaction and perceptual demand characteristics through quantitative analysis. To address this problem, some uncertainty techniques including rough sets and fuzzy sets are applied to capture more accurate emotion knowledge. Therefore, this research proposes an integrated evaluation gird method (EGM), rough set theory (RST), continuous fuzzy kano model (CFKM), fuzzy weighted association rule mining method to extract the significant relationship between user needs and product morphological features. The EGM is applied to analyze the attractive factor of morphological characteristics of the product, and then the demand items with the highest satisfaction are analyzed through CFKM. The semantic difference method is combined to construct a decision table, and through attribute reduction and importance calculation to obtain the weight of the core product design items. In order to explore the non-linear relationship between design elements and kansei images, the fuzzy weighted association rule mining method was applied to obtain the set of frequent fuzzy weighted association rules based on evidence theory’s reliability indices of minimum support and confidence so as to realize user demand-driven product design. Taking the design of electric bicycle as an example, the experiment results show that the proposed method can help companies or designers develop products to generate good solutions for customer need.