A Novel DEMATEL Approach by Considering Normalization and Invertibility

Abstract

DEMATEL is a popular approach in multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) to understand the influence relationship between elements. In addition, the result of DEMATEL is used as the input in other approaches to explore further applications. However, DEMATEL may fail to derive the reasonable total influence matrix, i.e., all positive elements. Hence, DEMATEL uses a special normalization method to avoid that situation. It has been reported that selecting the normalization method plays a critical role after we determine the research method. This paper compares different normalization methods in DEMATEL and proposes a novel formula to derive the total influence matrix when the conventional DEMATEL cannot obtain a correct result. The numerical examples demonstrate how different normalization methods generate contradicted results of DEMATEL and the proposed approach ensures a reasonable result. In addition, we also shed light on further applications based on this paper.