“…Therefore, with the manufacturing industry as the research object and to ensure a comprehensive evaluation of the high-level manufacturing industry developments in China, based on previous studies, this research developed an integrated index system that encompassed seven aspects: innovation, structural optimization, economic benefit, efficiency improvement, green development, international competition, and social benefit. Many evaluation methods have been used in previous studies, such as AHP (Huang, Sun, & Zhang, 2018;Pan, Han, Lu, Jiao, & Ming, 2020), TOPSIS (F. Jiang et al, 2020;Wang & Duan, 2019), neural networks (Lei, Chen, Xue, & Liu, 2019;Sun, Tang, & Bai, 2019) and gray correlation analysis (Ding, Wu, Zhao, Mu, & Yu, 2019;Ozcan & Tuysuz, 2016), of which the gray correlation-TOPSIS method (Liang et al, 2016;Yang & Wu, 2019) has often been used for multi-attribute evaluations because it has simple calculations and no special data requirements. In this study, therefore, an entropy weighting method was used with the traditional gray correlation-TOPSIS method, and the entropy weight, mean square deviation and maximum deviation combination weighting methods were employed to determine the weights of each index indicator, which together provided more objectivity than a single weighting method and were able to effectively reflect the objective information contained in the index indicator data.…”