Partner selection in virtual enterprises

A virtual enterprise (VE) is a temporary organisation that pools member enterprises core competencies and exploits fast changing market opportunities. VEs offer new opportunities to companies operating with a growing number of participants (consumers, vendors, partners and others) in a global business environment. The success of such an organisation is strongly dependent on its composition, and the selection of partners therefore becomes a crucial issue. Partner selection can be viewed as a multi-criteria decision making problem that involves assessing trade-offs between conflicting tangible and intangible criteria, and stating preferences based on incomplete or non-available information. In general, this is a very complex problem due to the large number of alternatives and criteria of different types (quantitative, qualitative and stochastic). In this paper we propose an integrated approach to rank alternative VE configurations using an extension of TOPSIS (a technique for ordering preferences by similarity to an ideal solution) for fuzzy data, improved through the use of a tabu search meta-heuristic. A sensitivity analysis is also presented. Preliminary computational results clearly demonstrate the potential of the approach for practical application.