Partner selection with a due date constraint in virtual enterprises

In this paper, the partner selection problem with a due date constraint in virtual enterprises is proved to be an NP-complete problem. So it cannot have any polynomial time solution algorithm at present. A nonlinear integer programming model for this problem is established. The objective function and a constraint function of the model have monotone properties. Based on the above observations, a Branch & Bound algorithm is constructed to solve the problem. Numerical experiments show that the algorithm is efficient.