Partner selection in Virtual enterprises using the Interval Neutrosophic fuzzy approach

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet, information technology, and globalization of the economy, Some small and medium-sized companies know that they cannot compete with their limited capacity alone. As a result, they are beginning to seek collaboration and a collective approach to meet the dynamic needs of customers and increase their power for competition in the market. Virtual enterprise is a temporary platform for working with different companies that share their core tasks to meet customer’s demand. Partner selection is a major issue in the formation of a virtual organization. This is especially difficult due to the uncertainties regarding information, market dynamics, customer expectations, and rapidly changing technology, with highly random decision making. As a generalization of fuzzy sets and intuitionistic fuzzy sets, Neutrosophic sets are created to show the uncertain, and inconsistent information available in the real world. The main purpose of this paper is to identify and select partners in the formation of Virtual Enterprises under uncertainty and contradictory factors using the extended VIKOR group decision making technique using the Interval Neutrosophic fuzzy approach. For this purpose, after identifying the factors affecting partner selection, the factors are weighted using the Maximizing deviation method and the partners are ranked using this method. Finally, a sensitivity analysis for assessing the validity of the method is also presented. The results show that the Willingness to share information criterion is the most important partner selection criterion in this enterprise.

Keywords

• virtual enterprise
• partner selection
• interval neutrosophic numbers
• group decision making
• uncertainty
• vikor.