A comprehensive evaluation method for cross-organizational service selection

Service selection has become a key step for cross-organizational collaboration in service-oriented practices and gained ever-increasing attention in both academic and industrial domains. However, the organizations involved may hold different types of evaluation scores, e.g., crisp number, value range and fuzzy linguistic terms. Besides, for the scores of fuzzy linguistic terms, different organizations may hold various evaluation granularities to meet their personalized preferences, which further increase the difficulties for unified service evaluation. So it is a great challenge to take these aspects into consideration for cross-organizational service selection. In view of this challenge, a comprehensive evaluation method named CRML (Crisp number-value Range-Multiple granularities Linguistic terms, CRML) is put forward in this paper. First, the scores of various evaluation types are unified into a form of trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. Second, a classic TOPSIS method is employed to rank all the candidate services for cross-organizational service selection. Finally, a case study is brought forth to validate the feasibility of our proposal.