A Scientific Decision Framework for Cloud Vendor Prioritization under Probabilistic Linguistic Term Set Context with Unknown/Partial Weight Information

Abstract

With the tremendous growth of Cloud Vendors, Cloud vendor (CV) prioritization is a complex decision-making problem. Previous studies on CV selection use functional and non-functional attributes, but do not have an apt structure for managing uncertainty in preferences. Motivated by this challenge, in this paper, a scientific framework for prioritization of CVs is proposed, which will help organizations to make decisions on service usage. Probabilistic linguistic term set (PLTS) is adopted as a structure for preference information, which manages uncertainty better by allowing partial information ignorance. Decision makers’ (DMs) relative importance is calculated using the programming model, by properly gaining the advantage of the partial knowledge and attributes, the weights are calculated using the extended statistical variance (SV) method. Further, DMs preferences are aggregated using a hybrid operator, and CVs are prioritized, using extended COPRAS method under the PLTS context. Finally, a case study on CV prioritization is provided for validating the scientific framework and the results are compared with other methods for understanding the strength and weakness of the proposal.