【摘要】 运用合作网络形成虚拟企业有助于成员企业或组织之间建立相互信任、降低寻找合适的合作伙伴花费的成本和时间。本文提出一种基于复杂网络分析的虚拟企业合作伙伴选择方法,该方法在决策过程中引入企业的主观性,从合作伙伴的核心能力、虚拟企业的敏捷性以及成员之间的信任性等多方面构建了合作网络中虚拟企业成员的选择机制,为有效选择虚拟企业成员提供了一种新的视角和方法。更多还原

【Abstract】 With the rapidly changing market environment, no enterprises can have all necessary capabilities and resources in order to capitalize on growing business opportunities. As a result, many virtual enterprises(VE) are emerging to provide capabilities not possessed by other companies. The essence of VE is the process of partner selection for specific business/production tasks. If a VE belongs to part of a collaboration network, it may help members communicate better with each other due to previously established trust and collaborative experiences. This kind of VE generation could also reduce the cost of partner selection. However, when the number of VE candidates are increased the collaboration network also becomes larger and more complicated. It’s very difficult for decision-makers to efficiently select appropriate partners from a collaborative network because of complex information, knowledges, and relevant production indicators, such as the time, quality, cost, and service. Therefore, we propose a complex-network-analysis based partner selection method to resolve this issue. In addition, we introduce the enterprise subjectivity into the decision making process, and build a VE creation mechanism. This mechanism can help understand objective core competencies of network members, VE business agility as well as members’ credibility. The study provides a new method with a collaboration network perspective to solve partner selection problems for VE. In this work, we first briefly introduce the enterprise collaboration network which analyzes the collaboration from the perspective of social networking. We use the Degree Centrality to denote enterprises’ importance of a collaboration network and use the Betweenness Centrality to measure an enterprise’s ability to control other enterprises. Both indicators show different positions of an enterprise in a cooperation network. These two indicators can affect VE’s resource control ability, cooperation relation, and competitiveness. Second, we build up a partner selection mechanism based on the social network analysis method. In view of the production characteristics of cooperation between enterprises, we introduce three generalized principles, including enterprise’s capacity, agility and trustfulness, to analyze the optimal partner selection process. Moreover, we address an algorithm for partner selection in a collaboration network. Third, we conduct an empirical study of partner selection using the real data of a heavy equipment production collaboration network. This work has collected the cooperation relationship among manufacturers from 29 projects started in 2006, 2007 and 2009. A total of 42 enterprises in the industry participated in this study. They are divided into 6 different types of firms according to their dominant business. Empirical results show this heavy equipment production collaboration network follows the power-law distribution with an exponent of 2.59. It means this network shows a strong preferential attachment characteristic. In an open network, it refers to that new nodes(previous outside the network) are always preferentially to connect with the nodes having high connections. In general, the greater degree the note the greater the possibility the note will be selected to create a new connection. Finally, member competitiveness in a collaborative network has been discussed. We use the betweenness centrality of enterprises to measure its industry status and degree centrality to measure its competitiveness. Moreover, weconstruct an enterprises competitiveness matrix model to assess the competitiveness of enterprises in the cooperation network. Furthermore, we use the empirical data to demonstrate enterprises’ competitiveness status in a heavy equipment production collaborative network. This paper has four major contributions. First, this paper argues that each of the previous collaboration between any two enterprises is the result of a partner selection. Thus, it is reasonably to use the cooperation experience data to measure an enterprise’s core competence in the collaboration network. In this work, we introduce the enterprise subjectivity(such as previous evaluation and cooperation, etc) into the decision-making process instead of the traditional expert objective decision. Second, based on the complex network analysis method, we construct a new partner selection model of VE in the collaborative network. Third, we propose a method to map core competencies, agility and trustfulness into a series of network measures. Fourth, we present a new partner selection mechanism and algorithm for efficient VE generation in collaboration networks with visual and simple network measures.更多还原