Modeling Multilevel Supplier Selection Problem Based on Weighted-Directed Network and Its Solution

Abstract

With the rapid development of economy, the supplier network is becoming more and more complicated. It is important to choose the right suppliers for improving the efficiency of the supply chain, so how to choose the right ones is one of the important research directions of supply chain management. This paper studies the partner selection problem from the perspective of supplier network global optimization. Firstly, this paper discusses and forms the evaluation system to estimate the supplier from the two indicators of risk and greenness and then applies the value as the weight of the network between two nodes to build a weighted-directed supplier network; secondly, the study establishes the optimal combination model of supplier selection based on the global network perspective and solves the model by the dynamic programming-tabu search algorithm and the improved ant colony algorithm, respectively; finally, different scale simulation examples are given to testify the efficiency of the two algorithms. The results show that the ant colony algorithm is superior to the tabu search one as a whole, but the latter is slightly better than the former when network scale is small.