GCRITICPA: A CRITIC and Grey Relational Analysis Based Service Ranking Approach for Cloud Service Selection

The dynamic nature of users’ functional & non-functional requirements and the ever-increasing number of cloud service providers with similar functionalities poses a significant challenge on the identification of trustworthy cloud services. Existing service selection approaches lacks in trust-based evaluation in terms of compliance between the service provision and the user requirements mentioned in the Service Level Agreements (SLAs), which results in inconsistent ranking of Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) due to the rank reversal phenomenon. As a solution to the rank reversal problem, this paper presents Grey CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation Parallel Analysis (GCRITICPA) based service ranking approach that employs CRITICA to determine weights of the criteria Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) to rank the trustworthy cloud service providers. A case study using real world Cloud Armor trust feedback dataset demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed approach in terms of trustworthiness and rank preservation.