New product design with sustainability driven quality function deployment reinforced by patent mining

In today's business environment, companies need a systematic new product development process that is not only a customer expectations but also sustainability requirements in a short time. QFD is a structural approach to deploy the customer expectations to the product characteristics and production parameters. Besides this, companies should adopt technological developments to their product and production process for maintaining their lives under competitive market conditions. The most reliable and safety way to be aware of the technological developments is to keep track the related patents. But the abundance of patents makes them difficult to track. Patent mining is an effective way to reach the related patents and benefit them. In this study, a new methodology is proposed for integrating sustainability requirements of product besides customer expectations named "New product design with sustainability driven QFD reinforced by patent mining". Sustainability is considered as three dimensions; economic, social and environmental issues. In the proposed methodology, the first matrix of QFD called house of quality (HoQ) is expanded by defining sustainability requirements. AHP is carried out to determine the importance degree of requirements in the HoQ matrix. An intermediate stage is injected into the process planning matrix, the third matrix of QFD, to increase the quality and inclusiveness of the inputs. In the intermediate stage, it is suggested to carry out a patent mining study for the critical processes. The case study on a proposed methodology is implemented on the horizontal stabilizer of the F-16 aircraft. Four stages of QFD are carried out that there are very few studies in the literature that do this. A patent mining study is applied to composite material technology for stabilizer parts. Lingo clustering algorithm was used to identify cluster labels. It is aimed to contribute to the increase of the locality and nationality ratio of the Turkish Air Force by making the product design of this part.