Abstract: This paper focuses on the construction of strategic delivery force, aiming to specify the current construction level by using the grey cluster evaluation. The result can be used for providing support for decisions about the formulation of future target improvement measures.Firstly, a three-layer index system is proposed to describe the characteristics of the strategic delivery force about composition structure, the delivery process and sources of the materials which are going to be delivered. Secondly, the traditional possibility functions employed in the grey clustering evaluation have been modified to overcome the drawback that they are not able to express the uncertain factors which origin from multiple sources. Then, the detailed implementation steps of the newly developed improved possibility function based grey clustering evaluation of strategic delivery force are presented. At last, the practicability and effectiveness of the proposed method are demonstrated through a numerical analysis with regard to a key element of the index system. Finally, the practicability and effectiveness of the proposed method are verified by numerical analysis of a core component of the index system.

Key words: Strategic delivery, Uncertainty, Grey clustering evaluation, Possibility function, Grey number