Multi-criteria Partner Selection in Virtual Organizations

Virtual organization partner selection has recently attracted the attention of researchers from various fields. The need for partner selection arises when a broker (e.g., Katzy & Dissel, 2001) identifies a collaboration opportunity and is willing to form a virtual organization (VO). Several researchers have suggested that a pool of proactively cooperating organizations would be an efficient platform for creating VOs (Lau & Wong, 2001; Camarinha-Matos & Afsarmanesh 2003; Tølle & Bernus, 2003). Here, we follow the terminology of Camarinha-Matos and Afsarmanesh (2003), who call this pool a virtual organization breeding environment (VBE). The idea is that a VBE provides a common structure for repeated VO creation, hence decreasing the costs related to ad hoc VO creation. Such a VBE structure includes, for instance, a common ICT infrastructure, contract templates and decision-support tools for agile VO creation.