An Integrated IVHFS and DEMATEL-ANP Framework for Competitive Intelligence Evaluation in Smart Factories

Abstract

In the era of big data, the ability to evaluate high-quality and actionable competitive intelligence (CI) has become essential for smart factories to support data-driven decision-making and maintain technological and operational advantages. However, the highly dynamic and complex nature of the smart manufacturing environment introduces considerable uncertainty, hesitation, and interdependencies among evaluation indicators, posing significant challenges to traditional decision-making frameworks. To address these issues, this study proposes an integrated framework that combines interval-valued hesitant fuzzy sets (IVHFS) with the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory-analytic network process (DEMATEL-ANP). IVHFS is employed to capture the ambiguity and hesitation inherent in expert judgments, enabling a more flexible and realistic representation of evaluation inputs. Subsequently, the DEMATEL-ANP approach is used to uncover the causal relationships among CI indicators and to construct a network-based weighting structure that reflects their interdependencies. A case study in a smart factory is conducted to validate the practicality and effectiveness of the proposed framework, and a sensitivity analysis confirmed its stability.OPEN ACCESS Received: 04/08/2025 Accepted: 28/10/2025 Published: 23/01/2026

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