Quality function deployment (QFD) is a customer-oriented product/service design tool with diversified team members reaching a consensus in developing a new or an improved product/service to maximize customer satisfaction. Determining the relative importance ratings (RIRs) of customer requirements (CRs) is actually a multiple attribute decision making (MADM) problem, which is regarded as an essential step in QFD application. Although many decision making approaches have been developed to rate the CRs, few of them refer to derive the weights of evaluators, and there is paucity of literature which combines the probabilistic linguistic term sets (PLTSs) with QFD methodology. Therefore, PLTSs are introduced in our study, to simultaneously reflect the hesitancy and preference degrees of evaluators. A novel MADM technique based on probabilistic linguistic preference (PLP) is explored to calculate the RIRs among CRs under the PLP environment. Concretely, some operators, such as the normalization formulas, the probabilistic linguistic expected value (PLEV) operator as well as the standard formula, are applied to weight the decision makers; a modified grey relational analysis-technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (GRA-TOPSIS) method called probabilistic linguistic-based GRA-TOPSIS is also proposed to rate the relative importance over CRs. Finally, application of product improvement of a turbine engine is given to see the validity and feasibility of the proposed approach.

质量功能部署（QFD）是一种面向客户的产品/服务设计工具，多元化的团队成员在开发新产品或改进产品/服务以使客户满意度最大化方面达成共识。确定客户需求（CR）的相对重要性等级（RIR）实际上是一个多属性决策（MADM）问题，被认为是QFD应用程序中必不可少的步骤。尽管已开发出许多决策方法来对CR进行评分，但很少有方法可以得出评估者的权重，并且很少有文献将概率语言术语集（PLTS）与QFD方法相结合。因此，在我们的研究中引入了PLTS，以同时反映评估者的犹豫和偏好程度。探索了一种基于概率语言偏好（PLP）的新型MADM技术，以计算PLP环境下CR之间的RIR。具体来说，一些运算符，例如归一化公式，概率语言期望值（PLEV）运算符以及标准公式，都可以用来对决策者进行加权。还提出了一种通过类似于理想解决方案（GRA-TOPSIS）的顺序偏好的改进的灰色关联分析技术，称为概率基于语言的GRA-TOPSIS，以评估相对于CR的相对重要性。最后，给出了涡轮发动机产品改进的应用，以验证该方法的有效性和可行性。概率语言期望值（PLEV）运算符以及标准公式用于权衡决策者；还提出了一种通过类似于理想解决方案（GRA-TOPSIS）方法的顺序偏好的改进的灰色关联分析技术，称为基于概率语言的GRA-TOPSIS，以评估相对于CR的相对重要性。最后，给出了涡轮发动机产品改进的应用，以验证该方法的有效性和可行性。概率语言期望值（PLEV）运算符以及标准公式用于权衡决策者；还提出了一种通过类似于理想解决方案（GRA-TOPSIS）的顺序偏好的改进的灰色关联分析技术，称为概率基于语言的GRA-TOPSIS，以评估相对于CR的相对重要性。最后，给出了涡轮发动机产品改进的应用，以验证该方法的有效性和可行性。