The Choice Of Business Partner In Uncertain Environment

With the development of economy, the problem about enterprise’s partner selection has become an important part of supply chain management. Selecting partners reasonably can directly help companies reduce costs and enhance competitiveness in the supply chain. In real life, this kind of decision problems often meet with uncertainty, so this paper use uncertainty theory to study the enterprise’s partner selection problem and provide corresponding method in the situation of selecting single supplier or multiple suppliers.When a single supplier can meet the demand of enterprise, this paper employs a new multiple attribute decision making method to solve the problem. The method is using uncertainty theory to combine AHP with TOPSIS. The former one is used to determine the weights of attributes,and the latter one is used to rank comprehensively. In order to describe the indeterminacy during determining the weights, we characterize the relative important degrees of attributes as uncertain variables. Then uncertain variables are quantified by the expected value method and the weights of attributes are obtained. During ranking the alternatives, we describe the performance ratings of alternatives with respect to attributes as uncertain variables. Then we use the optimistic value method and uncertain distance formula to determine the best alternative. At last, an example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.When the order quantity is very large and a single supplier can’t meet the demand of the enterprise, the enterprise will select multiple suppliers at the same time, and need to consider the order quantity from different suppliers. This article employs uncertain goal programming method to solve practical problem in this situation. In his article, commodity’s production costs, product qualified rate, production time and credibility are described as uncertain variables, then we set up an uncertain goal programming model for the supplier selection and purchasing plan. Then the Lingo software is used to find the optimal solution. At last, a practical example is given to provide a plan for optimal selection and quantity allocation.The main innovative points of this paper are given as follows:1. Uncertain variables are used to describe the uncertain factors in the problem of enterprise’s partner selection.2. This paper use uncertain theory to combine AHP with TOPSIS which is a new multiple attribute decision making method.3. An uncertain goal programming model is established for the problem of enterprise’s partner selection and quantity distribution. Based on the algorithms of uncertain variables, we give the equivalent form of the model.