A MULTI-CRITERIA DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR THE FORMATION OF COLLABORATIVE NETWORKS OF ENTERPRISES Jose Antonio Crispim Universidade do Minho, PORTUGAL crispim@eeg. uminho.pt Jorge Pinho Sousa INESC Porto, Faculty of Engineering Univ. Porto, PORTUGAL jsousa@inescporto.pt In this paper we present a Decision Support System (DSS) to deal with the partner selection problem taking place in the formation or re-organization of a Virtual Enterprise (VE). This DSS is based on a multi-criteria model and handles several types of data (numerical, interval, linguistic and binary). This approach is used to facilitate the expression of the decision maker's preferences and assessments about the potential partners and can be performed individually or by group. The system also allows the assignment of a degree of confidence to each linguistic statement. The operation of the DSS is structured in two phases. In the first phase it determines the set of non- dominated alternatives (potential VEs) through the use of meta-heuristics. The second phase ranks the alternatives for a possible network of enterprises configuring the VE. This is achieved through a procedure based on linguistic analysis and distance measures. 1. INTRODUCTION In the information age competition is expected to take place less among single companies, and increasingly among groups of enterprises working together to explore emerging business opportunities (Katzy and Dissel, 2001). This new reality is in fact giving smaller companies the possibility to compete with large multinationals. A Virtual Enterprise (VE) is a temporary alliance between globally distributed independent companies working together to improve their competitiveness by sharing resources, skills, risks and costs. Since each partner brings a strength or core competence to the consortium, the success of the VE strongly depends on the achieved level of co-operation. The creation of a VE is usually triggered by a market opportunity, giving rise to a "project". Projects are usually decomposable in relatively independent sub-projects or activities. The work needed to "fulfil" a project involves a set of collaborative activities that can be dependent, when relations of precedence between activities exist, or independent, if that is not the case. Therefore, before a VE is formed, the different input and output characteristics of each activity have to be clearly defined, particularly the required degree of synchronisation, the actors involved and the resources needed. The success of a project is strongly dependent on the composition of the VE. Hence, the selection of the partners becomes a crucial part of its lifecycle. This