A New Revised Group DEMATEL method with application on facility location problem

Abstract

Multi-criteria methods are commonly used in facility location problem to evaluate different facility locations in the presence of a set of criteria in order to select the best facility location. The increasing availability of Internet-of-Things (IoT) data, can be a help in gathering the necessary data for the location evaluation. The paper proposes a New Revised Group DEMATEL (NRG-DEMATEL) multi-criteria method, aiming to analyse cause-and-effect relationships among a set of criteria. This method provides general conditions which imply the convergence to the null matrix of the sequence of powers of the initial relation matrix, hence the total influence matrix can be computed. DEMATEL is infeasible when the sequence of powers of the initial relation matrix does not converge to the null matrix. The NRG-DEMATEL can be applicable to all situations feasible or infeasible. For the cases that are feasible, our method leads to the same result as the original method DEMATEL. The causality diagram and the digraph, that can visualize the causal relationships of a set of criteria, are built with the NRG-DEMATEL method. In order to reduce the complexity of the digraph, a threshold value is set to filter out negligible effects. Two methods for computing the thresholds are considered in this paper: the arithmetic mean method and the arithmetic mean - standard deviation method. An application of the NRG-DEMATEL to hospital facility problem is realized.