Control of Supply Risk Based on Ranking Foreign Suppliers Using Pattern Search Weighted Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation

Essential characteristics of foreign suppliers are identified that should be considered in the supplier selection process to control supply chain disruption risk in the manufacturerpsilas assembly operation. Since that the tangible and intangible characteristics are integrated in the supplier-ranking procedure and the multi-criteria evaluation system is introduced while the weight of each criteria may not be known in advance, in this paper, the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation (FCE) is employed to settle the prompt break skip illogicality of the membership degree of supplierpsila performance to a reliability level, and the pattern search algorithm (PSA) is imposed to figure out the significant weights to make full use of existing well-known benchmark supplier selected by consultants and manufacturerpsilas executives in group-decision rather than completely subjective preferring determination by persons. A case study is presented in which a manufacturer ranks its current foreign supplier against two other potentials based on criterions of supply reliability. The outcome illustrates the practicality of the pattern search weighted FCE methodpsilas application in the selection strategy of foreign business partners.