A framework of cloud service selection with criteria interactions

Abstract

Existing cloud service selection techniques assume that service evaluation criteria are independent. In reality, there are different types of interactions between criteria. These interactions influence the performance of a service selection system in different ways. In addition, a lack of measurement indices to validate the performance of service selection methods has hindered the development of decision making techniques in the service selection area. This paper addresses these critical issues of modeling the interactions between cloud service selection criteria, and designing indices to validate service selection methods. In this paper, we propose a Cloud Service Selection with Criteria Interactions framework (CSSCI) that applies a fuzzy measure and Choquet integral to measure and aggregate non-linear relations between criteria. We employ a non-linear constraint optimization model to estimate the Shapley importance and criteria interaction indices. In addition, we design a priority-based CSSCI (PCSSCI) to solve service selection problems in the situation where there is a lack of historical information to determine criteria relations and weights. Furthermore, we discuss an approximate solution for CSSCI to reduce its computing complexity. Finally, we design three indices to validate the cloud service selection methods. The experimental results preliminarily prove the technical advantage of the proposed models in contrast to several existing models.