According to requirement of cooperative manufacturing partner selection based on
networked manufacturing environment, the paper resolves cooperative manufacturing partner
selection problem by ant colony algorithm and grey relation theory: Firstly, manufacturing task is
divided into series of working procedure in time order by technologic planning. Secondly,
considerable candidate enterprises are selected in terms of multi-hierarchy grey relation coefficient at
each working procedure node to reduce the size of problem. Lastly, cooperative enterprise selecting
path is decided by making use of ant colony algorithm in light of transportation cost.
