Application of a hybrid intelligent decision support model in logistics outsourcing

Outsourcing is an increasingly important issue pursued by corporations seeking improved efficiency. Logistics outsourcing or third-party logistics (3PL) involves the use of external companies to perform some or all of the firm's logistics activities. This paper proposes an intelligent decision support framework for effective 3PL evaluation and selection. The proposed framework integrates case-based reasoning, rule-based reasoning and compromise programming techniques in fuzzy environment. This real-time decision-making approach deals with uncertain and imprecise decision situations. Furthermore, the integration of different methodologies takes the advantage of their strengths and complements each other's weaknesses. Consequently, the framework leads to a more accurate. flexible and efficient retrieval of 3PL service providers (alternatives) that are most similar and most useful to the current decision situation. Finally, a real industrial application is given to demonstrate the potential of the proposed framework. (c) 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.