A framework for key element evaluation of combat system

Key element protection of combat system is a challenging problem in modern combat. Effectively evaluating the key elements would be of great help in force deployment in crisis situations. This paper proposes a new evaluation method that combines expert evaluation, PCA (Principal Component Analysis) and TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution). Specifically, we first use expert evaluation to get attributes' values of each element. Then, we apply PCA to extract principal components from elements' attributes. Next, we use TOPSIS to calculate elements' proximities to ideal solutions under different principal components. Finally, we synthesize each element's proximity under different principal component to get the relative superiority. In addition, we test the proposed method in an experimental combat scenario, and show the plausibility of this method.