Analytical Vehicle KANO Model Development

Abstract

This research proposes an analytical vehicle KANO model, called V-KANO Model, which will be able to improve vehicle technical characteristics and performance target setting more precisely at the early stage during vehicle design and development process. A vehicle needs to be designed to satisfy the wants of the customers, the key is to truthfully and accurately interpret customers’ wants into engineering specifications; in other words, to translate customers’ voices into vehicle’s technical characteristics and design targets correctly. In this research, the KANO model originally introduced by Japanese quality expert Dr. Noriaki Kano is improved and modified for vehicle’s technical characteristics and performance design targets setting. The conventional KANO model was only a qualitative-based general model lack of precision and detailed information, the new innovatively developed V-KANO Model modifies and improves it into a quantitative-based mathematical model which correlates the customers’ satisfaction degree of vehicle performance with the professional trained engineers’ evaluation index closely to successfully derive an analytical vehicle KANO model, which can be adopted to guide a new vehicle system technical characteristics and performance design targets setting and development at the early stages of vehicle design process.