Fuzzy trust evaluation based on consistency intensity for cloud services
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to define an evaluation model for cloud services to deal with the fuzzy information and propose a novel fuzzy evaluation method based on consistency intensity to analyze the quantitative value from the fuzzy information.
Design/methodology/approach
The cloud service evaluation framework is constructed, and different trusted indicators for the infrastructure services and the application services are designed, respectively. In the novel fuzzy evaluation method, the interval values can be aggregated by the Dempster-Shafer Theory and be transformed into the certain value by linguistic discount factor. The consistency intensity is proposed to determine the value of the linguistic discount factor, which can reflect the mainstream opinions in the assessment.
Findings
The proposed method can solve the problem on the analysis and synthesis of the fuzzy evaluation information. An instance of trust evaluation of cloud storage service is illustrated to verify that the proposed method can express the opinions of all evaluators more adequately.
Practical implications
A serial of experiments are carried out on NetLogo, and the results show that the proposed method is practical and efficient.
Originality/value
Instead of obtaining only the qualitative results by the multi-attribute decision-making method, the fuzzy evaluation method based on consistency intensity can obtain the quantitative results from the fuzzy information according to linguistic discount factor and consistency intensity.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation for Youth of China under Grant No. 61202351, the National Postdoctoral Fund under Grant No. 2011M500124, funding of Jiangsu Innovation Program for Graduate Education and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant No. CXZZ13_0171.
Citation
Huo, Y., Zhuang, Y. and Ni, S. (2015), "Fuzzy trust evaluation based on consistency intensity for cloud services", Kybernetes, Vol. 44 No. 1, pp. 7-24. https://doi.org/10.1108/K-03-2014-0058
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited