A QoS-Aware Service Evaluation Method for Co-selecting a Shared Service

Abstract

In service selection, an end user often has his or her personal preferences imposing on a candidate service's non-functional properties. For a service selection process promoted by a group of users, candidate services are often evaluated by a group of end users who may have different preferences or priorities. In this situation, it is often a challenging effort to make a tradeoff among various preferences or priorities of the users. In view of this challenge, a multi-criteria decision-making method, named AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process), is introduced to transform both qualitative personal preferences and users' priorities into numeric weights. Furthermore, a QoS-aware service evaluation method is presented for a shared service's co-selection taking advantage of AHP theory. At last, a case study is presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the method.