Multiple criteria partner selection in virtual enterprises

A virtual enterprise (VE) is a temporary organization that pools member enteiprises core competencies and exploits fast changing market opportunities 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. In this paper we propose an integrated approach to rank alternative VE configurations using an extension of the TOPSIS method for fuzzy data, improved through the use of a tabu search meta-heuristic. Preliminary computational results clearly demonstrate its potential for practical application.