Identifying critical factors in systems with interrelated components: A method considering heterogeneous influence and strength attenuation

Identifying the key factors of interconnected systems and their relationships is a typical task in system analysis. However, most previous methods consider less about the nuanced effects of positive and negative influences on the accuracy of identification of critical factors in systems. The initial importance and strength attenuation effects of factors are often omitted in previous studies. To solve these problems, a novel method considering heterogeneous influence and strength attenuation (HISA) effects is developed in this paper. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by applying it to design of smart home system. Comparisons between the proposed method and previous approaches are conducted. The results show that the proposed method can make full use of the limited information and discern subtle relationships between factors to obtain more accurate and reasonable results.