A framework for prioritizing cloud services in neutrosophic environment

Abstract

Cloud service selection assists cloud users to find the best cloud services as per their needs and minimizes the loss occurring due to improper selection of services. This paper aims to develop a cloud service selection framework for the neutrosophic environment using single-valued neutrosophic set (SVNS) theory and multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) based technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). The SVNS helps cloud users and experts to express their opinion in linguistic terms rather than crisp value due to partial knowledge involving some degree of truth, indeterminacy and falsehood. TOPSIS is used to rank cloud services efficiently. A case study has been performed on a real dataset obtained from CloudHarmony to demonstrate its practicality and usefulness. Sensitivity analysis has been carried out with the addition and deletion of cloud services to rank them and found that the framework is consistent and robust to rank reversal problem. The framework is also capable to strongly handle a fuzzy environment without rank reversal phenomenon in comparison with other MCDM based cloud service selection frameworks available in the literature.