The selection of cooperative partners is one of the most important factors when creating a virtual enterprise, and has been extensively researched in recent years. It is difficult to solve the selection problem using the traditional optimisation methods because the simultaneous consideration of many aspects of the problem is required, such as the running cost, the reaction time and the running risk. In this paper, an adaptive quantum swarm evolutionary algorithm with time-varying acceleration coefficients is proposed for the partner selection optimisation problem. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate that the improved algorithm is valid and outperforms other evolutionary algorithms.