Could service provider selection with ranked attribute weights: a PROMETHEE II-based study

The growing number of cloud services offered by different companies imposes new decision-making challenges to implement since different services can perform well for different performance criteria.This may suggest the use of multicriteria decision processes to identify the most appropriate cloud solution based on decision-maker (DM) preferences.However, depending on the multicriteria method adopted, it requires the precise estimation of criteria weights.For decision contexts in which the DM does not feel able to indicate or cannot specify the exact weight values, this paper considers the use of surrogate weights within the PROMETHEE II method to obtain a ranking of cloud service providers based on a set of performance criteria.We perform a numerical simulation using a quality service dataset composed of 2507 web services suppliers, and realistic data from a make-to-order (MTO) Brazilian company to demonstrate the usefulness of the decision approach for addressing the cloud service selection problem.