A decision method for supplier selection in multi‐service outsourcing

Although supplier selection in multi‐service outsourcing is a very important decision problem, research concerning this issue is still relatively scarce. This paper proposes a decision method for selecting a pool of suppliers for the provision of different service process/product elements. It pioneers the use of collaborative utility between partner firms for supplier selection. A multi‐objective model is built to select desired suppliers. This model is proved to be NP‐hard, so we develop a multi‐objective algorithm based on Tabu search for solving it. We then use an example to show the applicability of the proposed model and algorithm. Extensive computational experiments are also conducted to further test the performance of the proposed algorithm.