In recent years, labor-intensive industries is facing serious problem on shortage of labor, which forcing equipment manufacturers to gradually increase their usage on automation equipment, coupled with growth on development of automation equip-ment, causing global manufacturers continue to increase their production line on au-tomation investments. With increasing demand on small-volume production of a wide range of different items and labor shortages, Taiwan manufactures are actively taking part on applying automation to their production line. This research takes automation industry for example, using literatures reviews and in-depth interviews with automa-tion experts and manufacturers to find out assessment evaluation criteria and dimen-sions. Empirical analysis is preceded by Decision Making Trial and Evaluation La-boratory methodology (DEMATEL) to get importance and causal relationships within the evaluation factors, followed by Analytic Network Process (ANP) to assess the rel-ative weights for dimensions and criteria, in order to understand the gap of automation equipment usage for small and medium‐sized enterprises, and to provide a reference for government authorities and automation manufacturers.
