An improvement of critical technologies using quality function deployment, Data envelopment analysis and fuzzy concept

Critical technologies is a useful approach to assessing and ranking technologies or research directions which has been used widely in many countries. Since the assessment and scoring of technologies in this method is carried out based on expert judgments, the accuracy of the results will be heavily influenced by the expert's opinions. Applying fuzzy quality function deployment and using linguistic terms instead of crisp numbers in the evaluation process can improve the results of the conventional methodology of critical technologies. Moreover, using data envelopment analysis enable us to take into account all the criteria and assessment scores. We can also calculate one efficiency score for each technology and finally technologies are ranked with considerable ease. As a case study, the proposed method has been applied for identifying and prioritizing development technologies in IMIDRO. The results have been verified with expert knowledge and showed an improvement compared to the conventional method.