A Rough Set Based Approach to Distributor Selection in Supply Chain

• 1、shanghai university

Abstract：Distributor’s evaluation and selection is an important issue in supply chain management (SCM) particularly in current competitive environment. The current research works only provide conceptual, descriptive, and simulation results, focusing mainly on firm resources and general marketing/selling factors. In general, selection and evaluation of the distributor always include qualitative information. To analyze qualitative information which is difficult to operate by standard statistical techniques, a suitable approach is desired. In this paper, the Rough Set Theory (RST) based method which has been recognized as a powerful tool in dealing with qualitative data from literature is introduced and modified for preferred distributor selection. With support of the proposed Rough Set based methodology, certain decision rules which are able to facilitate distributor selection were derived and several significant features were identified based on an empirical study conducted in Mainland China. Equal and unequal weights associated to the features were compared and discussed. This paper concludes with discussion of empirical findings and future research directions.

Keywords： Distributor selections data mining rough set theory (RST) supply chain knowledge management