An intelligent support system for supplier evaluation

摘要

Supplier evaluation is critical for Supply Chain Management (SCM). Based on the information gained from formalised supplier evaluation processes, a company can determine the relationship with the suppliers. If manufacturers can cooperate or interact with suppliers very well, it helps to maximise the productivity at the minimum cost while satisfying customer requirements. Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) provides a suitable mean for improving the effectiveness of complex and unstructured decision making, such as supplier evaluation. It is a machine reasoning method that adapts previous similar cases to infer further similarity. For effective case retrieval, a Genetic Algorithm (GA)-based approach used to determine the most appropriate feature weights is employed to enhance the case-matching process. Our proposed GA-CBR methodology used to predict vendor evaluation has been proven very effective and has better prediction accuracy over the results from other approaches as it minimises the effect of qualitative factors.