External partner selection using tabu search heuristics in distributed manufacturing

With every passing month, a number of new virtual enterprises emerge on the internet. Many companies have responded to the idea of distributed manufac turing in which the value adding activities comprising a finished product a re dispersed geographically in a remote place. This study suggests an idea for selecting partners in a distributed manufacturing environment, which en ables machining companies to share their capacities. A mathematical model i s constructed to show how to minimize the sum of the operation and transpor tation costs based on alternative process plans considering several kinds o f operation characteristics in the real world. Four heuristic algorithms ar e developed to get an optimal or near-optimal solution using tabu search si nce the model is proven NP-hard. Example problems are tested to illustrate their procedure and performance.