  The general idea of information entropy provided by C.E. Shannon "hangs over
everything we do" and can be applied to a great variety of problems once the
connection between a distribution and the quantities of interest is found. The
Shannon information entropy essentially quantify the information of a quantity
with its specific distribution, for which the information entropy based methods
have been deeply developed in many scientific areas including physics. The
dynamical properties of heavy-ion collisions (HICs) process make it difficult
and complex to study the nuclear matter and its evolution, for which Shannon
information entropy theory can provide new methods and observables to
understand the physical phenomena both theoretically and experimentally. To
better understand the processes of HICs, the main characteristics of typical
models, including the quantum molecular dynamics models, thermodynamics models,
and statistical models, etc, are briefly introduced. The typical applications
of Shannon information theory in HICs are collected, which cover the chaotic
behavior in branching process of hadron collisions, the liquid-gas phase
transition in HICs, and the isobaric difference scaling phenomenon for
intermediate mass fragments produced in HICs of neutron-rich systems. Even
though the present applications in heavy-ion collision physics are still
relatively simple, it would shed light on key questions we are seeking for. It
is suggested to further develop the information entropy methods in nuclear
reactions models, as well as to develop new analysis methods to study the
properties of nuclear matters in HICs, especially the evolution of dynamics
system.
