Maximum-Entropy-Based Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory and Its Application in Emergency Management

Decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) can visualize the structure of complex causal relationships, so it is widely used in decision making. One of the important steps in DEMATEL is normalization, and it has received much attention in recent years. Maximum entropy (MaxEnt) is a universal principle, and it is an effective tool for determining the amount of information existed in evidence. In this paper, the authors propose MaxEnt-based DEMATEL. The greatest contribution in this paper is the use of MaxEnt principle to determine the normalized direct influence matrix, which allows to obtain the normalized matrix with minimal information loss. The authors illustrate emergency management to show the superiority of the proposed method.