Identifying Critical Success Factors of an Emergency Information Response System Based on the Similar-DEMATEL Method

Abstract

An emergency information response system (EIRS) is a system that utilizes various intelligence technologies to effectively handle various emergencies and provide decision support for decision-makers. As critical success factors (CSFs) in EIRS play a vital role in emergency management, it is necessary to study the CSFs of EIRS. Most previous studies applied the Decision Experiment and Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method with complete evaluation information to identify CSFs. Due to the complexity of the decision-making environment when identifying CSFs of EIRS, decision-makers sometimes cannot provide complete evaluation information during the decision-making process. To fill this gap, this paper provided a Similar-DEMATEL method to impute the missing values and identify CSFs of EIRS, which may avoid the dilemma of decision distortion and make decision-making results more accurate. It is found that the factors of Information mining capability, Equipment support capability, Monitoring and early warning capability, and Organization participation capability are the CSFs in EIRS. Our proposed method differs from previous research, such as the mean imputation method, to impute the missing values. We compared the differences between the proposed method and the mean imputation method and gave the advantages of the proposed method. Our method focuses more on uncertain decision-making environments, which is conducive to improving the efficiency of EIRS in emergency management, and therefore it is more widely adopted.