Partner selection in a virtual enterprise under uncertain information about candidates

Partner selection is a major issue in the formation of a virtual enterprise. In practice, in the partner selection process, the information about the candidates and their performances are incomplete and uncertain. Vague sets theory is one of the methods used to deal with uncertain information. In this paper, a new method based on vague sets is proposed to deal with the partner selection problem in the formation of a virtual enterprise while the factors of satisfaction degree, due date, cost and the precedence of tasks are taken into account. On the basis of the agreement index of satisfaction degree, the formulated partner selection problems are interpreted so as to maximize the minimum agreement index. To solve the problem, an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed. Finally, the simulation of a numerical example demonstrates that the method is effective.