A Quantitative Approach for Conflict Identification and Its Application in Appraising Strategic Partners

Conflict analysis and resolution play an important role in business, governmental, political and lawsuit disputes, labor-management negotiations, military operations and others. The conflict degree between agents can be measured based on their attitudes toward a group of important issues. A conflict evaluation method is proposed under the circumstance that the opinions of agents toward an issue can be uncertain. Both the issue importance and aggregation structure are taken into account for integrating conflicts. A model is built for discovering weight parameters from experience. The approach is demonstrated through an example of strategic partner selection, which is recognized as more and more important in supply chain management.