A Novel Matching Method for Supply and Demand Based on Three-Way Decisions

For large manufacturing companies that offer personalized service, it is important to choose the optimal match between the demanders and suppliers. The existing researches mainly focused on how to get the most satisfying results for both sides, and they generally neglect the fairness and cooperative stability of the two-sided (bilateral) matching. This paper proposes a novel method to match demanders and suppliers based on the theory of three-way decisions. First, the computing method of satisfaction degree to attributes for both sides is constructed based on the fuzzy grey relational analysis (GRA) method, according to the preference information of the decision makers (DMs). Second, we also propose a method to evaluate the stability of cooperation between the two sides through the quantity ratio of supply and demand. Then, a three-way matching matrix is established by the theory of three-way decisions. Namely, the matching pairs are divided into three sub-parts which are called the core matching, the fringe matching and the trivial matching, respectively. Furthermore, a multi-objective optimization model is established from the perspective of satisfaction of the matching sides, fairness of the matching scheme and the overall benefit to select the optimal matching pairs. Finally, an example is given to illustrate the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method.