Service Selection Using Multi-criteria Decision Making: A Comprehensive Overview

The growing number of services that can meet the users’ functional requirements, inspired many researchers to provide some approaches to rank and select the best possible services regarding their quality of service (QoS) and users’ preferences. Considering various criteria which should be considered in the service selection process, multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques have been vastly applied to help a decision-maker in determining the weight of each QoS factor and ranking the services provided by different service providers. This paper provides an extensive investigation of the state of the art MCDM-based service selection schemes proposed in the literature. It provides the required background knowledge and puts forward a taxonomy of the investigated service selection schemes regarding their applied MCDM methods. Also, it describes how the MCDM methods are adapted by the studied schemes, which datasets and QoS criteria are employed by each system, and which factors and environments are utilized to evaluate the service selection schemes. Finally, the concluding remarks are provided, and directions for future studies are highlighted.