A Discrete PSO Algorithm for Partner Selection of Virtual Enterprise

The partner selection and optimization problem is an important area of virtual enterprise. The model of partner selection is analyzed in this paper. In a virtual enterprise, the whole task can be accomplished by the cooperation among those candidate partners. The optimal objective is to minimize the total cost and completing time. To improve the searching performance for particle swarm optimization (PSO), and satisfy the optimal target, a discrete PSO (DPSO) algorithm is presented and applied to solve the partner selection problem of virtual enterprise. In DPSO, each particle represents a candidate solution, and its component takes an integer number between I and the number of alternative enterprises of the certain sub-task. A series of experiments are performed and the simulation results are compared with the genetic algorithm (GA) to show the efficiency of the proposed DPSO algorithm. Moreover, the results obtained through the DPSO can be confirmed by the method of exhaustion.