Smart Integrated Partner Selection System (SPISS): A Decision Support System for Partner Selection in the Era of Industry Revolution 4.0

摘要

The world is in the midst of the fourth wave of the industrial revolution, which has been termed as Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR4.0). IR4.0 is characterised by smartness and networking concepts. Despite the benefits that are offered by IR4.0, several risks or challenges are related to this new emerging revolution. To understand the vision of IR4.0 there is a need to analyse it from the perspectives of collaborative networks (CNs). It is naturally multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary. CNs is made up of heterogeneous partners and consequently, several challenges are the heterogeneity of the network partners that can cause contradictory goals and contribute to the failure of establishing the CNs. To overcome issues that are related to partner selection in virtual CNs, a set of criteria for selecting partners needs to be identified. The process of selecting partners involves quantitative and qualitative criteria. However, the conventional methods which involve human judgment are usually based on uncertain criteria. It tends to create a biased decision. Partner selection based on qualitative criteria is challenging to measure due to the difficulty in assigning a numerical value to these criteria. Thus, these criteria are more freely interpreted. Therefore, the integration of ICT tools in the Decision Support System (DSS) for the CNs model, by considering the mechanism of measuring qualitative criteria. The focus of this research is to help decision-makers (DMs) in improving their decision making quality and effectiveness.