Multiple Criteria Decision Making in Application Layer Networks

Diploma Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: 1,3, University of Bayreuth (Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik (BWL VII)), language: English, comment: Work conducted to support the eRep - Social Knowledge for e-Governance project (An FP6 - Citizens and Governance in a Knowledge-Based Society project) , abstract: This work is concerned with the conduct of Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) by intelligent software agents trading digital commodities in Application Layer Networks (ALN) such as grids or clouds. These agents consider trustworthiness in their course of negotiation and select offers with respect to product price and seller reputation. To automate the selection process, we seek an appropriate MCDM method that provides clear advice for an agent prior to negotiating. We compare eleven well-known MCDM methods and choose the TOPSIS approach of Hwang and Yoon since it produces comprehensible and plausible results with a justifiable amount of effort. We modify the method and present a draft named xTOPSIS that promises intertemporal performance analysis for further automatation. The resulting tool is finally tested and evaluated in the context of a scenario similar to the eRep - Social Knowledge for e-Governance project.