An Independent System for the Evaluation of Contract Tenders

Abstract

After a description of British Coal's method of organizing purchase contracts and consequent requirements for evaluating tenders, reference is made to the use of linear programming to allocate business. The later part of the paper describes the development and operation of a user-friendly, menu-driven microcomputer decision-support system for tender evaluation called INSECT, which uses a purpose-built, quasi-optimizing routine rather than linear programming.