Optimizing the Partner Selection Problem and Scheduling the Collaborative Transportation

In today’s competitive business, companies are continuously looking for new ways to reduce their costs and improve their products’ quality. A company needs various resources to stay in the market and it can be challenging to provide these resources for small and medium-sized companies. Therefore, companies share their capacities with each other to achieve their common goals. This sharing can be done under the title of a virtual enterprise. A virtual enterprise is an economic alliance in which several companies share their capabilities to provide specific products and services. Virtual company’ advantages over the traditional companies include flexible structure and quick response to the market. VE should provide the situation for manufacturing products and services at a lower cost and higher quality with less risk and shorter lead times. So, partner selection has become a vital task for companies. The success of a virtual company is dependent on the selection of partners.In this study, a new partner selection model is presented with a VE concept integrated with collaborative transportation. The proposed model is presented in deterministic state. A numerical example is analyzed to investigate model behavior, and the results are presented and discussed. Finally, the sensitivity of the objective function is analyzed by some parameters and the results show that by increasing two parameters, the maximum number of sub-projects carried out by a partner and the transportation capacity, the total costs either decrease or remain unchanged.