Evaluation of partner companies based on fuzzy inference system for establishing virtual enterprise consortium

Abstract

Virtual Enterprise (VE) is one of the growing trends in agile manufacturing concepts. Under this platform companies with different skills and core competences are cooperate with each other in order to accomplish a manufacturing goal. Success of VE, as a consortium, highly depends on the success of its partners. So it is very important to choose the most appropriate companies to enroll in VE. In this study a Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) based approach is developed to evaluate and select the potential enterprises. The evaluation is conducted based on four main criteria; unit price, delivery time, quality and past performance. These criteria are considered as inputs of FIS and specific membership functions are designed for each. By applying fuzzy rules the output of the model, partnership chance, is calculated. In the end, the trustworthy of the model is tested and verified by comparing it with fuzzy-TOPSIS technique providing a sample. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.