A Combined VIKOR-TOPSIS Method with Application in Cloud Services Provider Selection

Abstract

In the last decades multi-criteria methods have known an important development and their area of application was significantly enlarged. Multi-criteria methods are used for making decisions that involve multiple and conflicting criteria. These methods consider a set of alternatives and a set of criteria. Each alternative is evaluated according to each criterion. As a result, a best alternative or an alternatives ranking is obtained. The selection of the appropriate multi-criteria method, for a decision, is an important problem. Two classical multi-criteria methods are TOPSIS and VIKOR, which have been proven effective through a large number of applications. Sometimes the two methods give different solutions regarding the alternatives ranking when they are starting from the same input data. In this paper we propose a new method that is a combination of these two methods. The combined VIKOR-TOPSIS method, is applied to evaluate and ranking a set of CSP (Cloud Service Provider) for selecting a best CSP, taking into account the user requirements and Quality of Service (QoS) criteria.

Authors

* External Author