Optimal composition of virtual enterprises with interval cost parameters

Virtual Enterprise (VE) is a temporary alliance of separate enterprises created to act together to share core competencies and resources in order to respond to market requirements of high quality, low cost, customer satisfaction, and quick responsiveness. The composition of virtual enterprises, which includes the selection of partners, is a vital issue that affects the success of VEs. This paper focuses on the solution procedure of the multi-objective partner selection problem in virtual enterprises where the cost coefficients are expressed as interval values by the decision maker. The paper uses a multi-objective algorithm, namely Pareto Simulated Annealing (PSA), and results showed improved values of the Pareto set as the iterations advances to get closer to each other until forming the final well-distributed Pareto front.