Enterprises are now facing growing global competition and the continual success in the marketplace depends very much on how efficient and effective companies are able to respond to customer demands. Business social network sites (BSNS) have provided a powerful tool to link up manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and customers. Among the emerging business social networks, decision support functionality addressing the issue of selecting business partners is an important domain to be studied, and it is the objective of this chapter to propose a practical partner selection decision support system. Essentially, a neural-network data mining system is used to generate information for subsequent fuzzy multi-objective analysis. It demonstrates the benefits of integrating information technology, artificial intelligence, and multi-objective decision making to form a practical aid that capitalizes on the merits of BSNS. A special feature is that the trust among companies can be incorporated as an evaluation criterion.
Guest editor’s introduction: special issue on analyzing and mining social networks for decision support and recommender systems
