An efficient composite cloud service model using multi-criteria decision-making techniques

Abstract

Recent advancements in information technology have made cloud computing one of the most prominent technologies. It is most favorable for the bundle of services that it provides to its users. Since there is a wide range of cloud service providers (CSPs) with various services, it is challenging for the user to select a CSP that can meet all of its requirements. In this paper, we propose a composite cloud service model, which is handled by a cloud agent, to identify the best cloud services/criteria from a set of CSPs by considering the objective and subjective opinions collected from the cloud users’ feedback and reviews. Note that the cloud agent is an intermediary between the users and CSPs. Then the agent recommends the CSPs to assemble the identified services into a unified group of services to fulfil the user requirements. Our model calculates the integrated objective and subjective scores of alternatives for a set of criteria and determines the best alternative for each criterion. For this, the application of two multi-criteria decision-making techniques, namely method based on the removal effect of criteria and extended step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis (extended SWARA), is used to calculate the objective and subjective scores, respectively. The proposed model is compared with the analytic hierarchy process-technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution, TOPSIS-VlseKriterijuska Optimizacija I Komoromisno Resenje (VIKOR), and SWARA-VIKOR to show its effectiveness.