In recent years, with the development of 'China's new urbanization, the “characteristic town movement” with the development of industrial economy first has brought problems to a large number of rural settlements, such as no cultural planning, no consumption of industry, and no soul. Then, in reality, there are still a large number of rural settlements under the planning of the upper-level local government, with the goal of developing into a characteristic town in the future. Therefore, this study believes that there is an urgent need to build a framework for evaluating the construction potential of rural settlements with sustainable characteristic towns. Not only that but also a decision analysis model should be provided for real-world empirical cases. This model needs to cover the assessment of the sustainable development potential of characteristic towns as the goal and the formulation of improvement strategies. This study combines the data collection of current characteristic town development rating reports, applies data exploration technology to extract core impact elements and obtain hierarchical decision rules, integrates expert domain knowledge with DEMATEL technology, and establishes an impact network relationship diagram between core impact elements. At the same time, the representative characteristic town cases are assessed for their sustainable development potential, and the modified VIKOR technique is applied to clarify the actual problems of the empirical cases, in an attempt to determine whether the development potential and development plan of the characteristic town meet the sustainable development needs from the pre-evaluation mechanism.