Study of Partner's Selection in Virtual Enterprise

A virtual enterprise (VE) is a temporary alliance organization that exploits fast changing market opportunities, and partners selection is one of the most critical activities in the formation of VE. However, parnters selection is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem, which is controlled by a number of tangible and intangible criteria. In this paper, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is proposed to deal with the partners selection. The approach can improve the accuracy of evaluation by combining the subjective opinion from the decision makers with the objective data of the relevant factors. Finally, a numerical example illustrates the method is simple and effective.