Ahp model for the selection of partner companies in virtual enterprises

Abstract

Rising product variety and complexity, shorter time frames to respond, and the continual need to gain new capabilities through innovativeness force the trend of outsourcing to be replaced by strategic alliances, where enterprises or individuals work together towards a common goal and share their responsibilities as well as their profits. Recent developments in information technology have enabled relatively inexpensive, reliable and fast networking to support such alliances in real time. In this context, the virtual enterprise (VE) represents an appropriate cooperation alternative and competitive advantage for the enterprises. VE is a temporary network of independent companiessuppliers, customers, even rivals -linked by information technology (IT) to share skills, costs and access to one another's markets. In this emerging business model of virtual enterprise, the decision support functionality, which addresses issues such as partner company selection, is an important domain to be studied. In this paper, we propose an analytic hierarchy process model to contribute in the selection of the partner companies in the virtual enterprises.A case example is also covered to validate the feasibility of the adoption of the model in virtual enterprise situations.

An enhanced ant colony optimiser for multi-attribute partner selection in virtual enterprises

“…goal programming (Hajidimitriou andGeorgiou 2002, Famuyiwa et al 2008), integer programming (Wu and Su 2005), and their enhanced types (Jarimo and Salo 2009); (3) fuzzy decisionmaking and multi-attributive decision-making (MADM) algorithms, e.g. analytic network process (ANP) (Chen et al 2008), analytical hierarchy process (AHP) (Sari et al 2008), fuzzy-AHP approach (Chan et al 2008), Technique for Order Performance by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) (Ye and Li 2009), fuzzy preference programming (Wang and Chen 2007), etc. ;and (4) heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms, e.g.…”

Partner selection in virtual enterprises: a multi-criteria decision support approach

“…In general, partner selection approaches do not use mixed types of variables, rather applying a single type of variables: only fuzzy numbers (e.g., Cao and Zhou 2006), or linguist terms (e.g., Lin et al 2007), or numbers, indexes and ratios (e.g., Sari et al 2007). In cases where an attempt to use quantitative and qualitative information together was made, approaches are usually rather inflexible, requiring for example the fixation of the scale cardinality (e.g., # ¼ 9 scale or a five-point like scale (Araz et al 2007)).…”

“…In general the DM has to define the weights of each criterion (see, e.g., Lin et al 2007, Sari et al 2007, Bu¨yu¨ko¨zkan et al 2008 as input data to the model, in a phase where not all relevant information is available or trustable. Moreover, the decision-maker's objectives and aspirations may change during the stage when the decision process is being structured.…”

Enterprise competence organization schema: publishing the published competences

“…usually a human) with good knowledge about companies was employed as a driving force for searching and recognizing market opportunities, planning and drafting collaboration, and estimating costs and revenues. In the current situation it is really difficult to handle the information about all the collaborative firms and thus, it becomes necessary to model the knowledge in a form that is manageable and addressable [57]. An ECOS model can be used here to capture domain knowledge and establish a consistent vocabulary which can be easily interpreted by the system as well as humans.…”