Multi-criteria Cloud Computing Service Provider Selection Employing Pythagorean Fuzzy AHP and VIKOR

Abstract

With the wide usage of Cloud Computing Services (CCS), finding the most suitable cloud service by matching criteria provided by different CCS providers have gained considerable importance in various commercial and scientific tasks. In this paper, we analyze cloud service provider evaluation and selection problem under fuzzy environment. To solve the problem, a novel fuzzy integrated multicriteria decision making method is proposed. In the proposed model, a hierarchical structure with six criteria which are financial, performance, security and privacy, assurance, agility and usability, and four alternatives, is designed based on comphrehensive literature review and consulting to the experts. The evaluations regarding to the cloud alternatives are expressed using Pythagorean fuzzy sets being an extension of intuitionistic fuzzy sets where the square sum of membership and non-membership degrees is at most “1”. In the analysis, the weights of the criteria are obtained using fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) based on single-valued Pythagorean fuzzy sets. Then, to rank the alternatives, the calculated weights from the previous analysis are used as inputs in single-valued Pythagorean fuzzy VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje, meaning of multi-criteria optimization and compromise solution (VIKOR) method. Finally, sensitivity analysis is performed to check the robustness and the applicability of the proposed model. © 2021, The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.