Research on partner selection problem of virtual enterprise based on improved genetic algorithm

The partner selection and optimization problem is an important area of virtual enterprise (VE). Genetic algorithm (GA) is optimization and parallel strategy simulating biology evolutionary mechanism in nature and a high efficient algorithm solving these types of problems. After analyzing the partner selection problems of virtual enterprise, the improved genetic algorithm (IGA) was presented to solve enterprise alliance problem within reasonable time and cost. There are certain number partners of each sub-task in virtual enterprise environment. The objective is, by selecting the optimal combination of partners, to minimize project´s completion time and project´s total cost. A set of experiments show that the algorithm is stable and presents low variability. We analyze the laboratory results to show that the improved algorithm has better characteristics than standard GA when it was used in partner selection problems.