ABSTRACT
The decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) technique has been widely applied to various complex social problems, such as setting marketing strategies, evaluating science parks, assessing safety issues, and making group decisions. This chapter shows the infeasibility of the original DEMATEL technique and explains a revised DEMATEL with an illustration. The DEMATEL technique can model the influential relationships among the attributes/variables/factors in a system by collecting opinions/knowledge/experience from decision makers or experts to form an initial direct-relation matrix. The DEMATEL technique can decompose the attributes in complex social problems into a cause group and an effect group, which enables a systematic analysis of the addressed problem. Various applications have adopted DEMATEL for forming strategies or conducting evaluations in fields such as marketing, innovation policy and airline safety measurement. The revised DEMATEL can guarantee the convergence of the new total influence matrix, which is more generalized than the original DEMATEL in certain cases.
