An Immune Evolutionary Algorithm with Punishment Mechanism for Public Procurement Expert Selection

In the past decade, fairness in public procurement expert selection has attracted research attention. This paper proposes an immune evolutionary algorithm (IEA) with a punishment mechanism for expert selection, in which an ordered weighted aggregation (OWA) operator is applied to adjust the score weights to reduce expert evaluation committee abuse discretion and Grubbs method is employed to test the outliers. The results from a real-life public procurement case demonstrated that the abnormal experts could be effectively suppressed during the selection process and that the proposed method performed better than either the random selection algorithm or IEA, neither of which considers a punishment mechanism. Therefore, the proposed method, which applied the abnormal data detected in the scoring process to the expert selection process with a punishment mechanism, was proven to be effective in solving public procurement problems that may have doubtful or abnormal experts.