PARETO-ORIENTED MODEL FOR SELECTING CLOUD SERVICES FOR HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

Abstract

The article considers the relevant scientific and practical problem of selecting cloud services (CS) for higher education institutions (HEIs) in the context of growing volumes of educational and scientific data, increased information security (IS) requirements, and the need to comply with regulatory and legal requirements for information protection. The cloud service selection process for HEIs is shown to be a complex multi-criteria task. This task is characterised by the presence of conflicting technical, economic, security and organisational criteria, the optimisation of which cannot be reduced to a single generalised indicator. A critical analysis of existing cloud service selection methods based on classical, fuzzy and integrated multi-criteria decision-making approaches was conducted. Their limitations in terms of forming a set of compromise alternatives have been identified. A multi-criteria model for selecting cloud services for higher education institutions has been proposed, based on the concept of Pareto optimality and not requiring the prior specification of criterion weighting coefficients. To solve the problem, the evolutionary algorithms of multi-criteria optimisation NSGA-III and MOEA/D were used. A computational experiment was conducted using realistic data from the State University of Trade and Economics, characterising the level of information security, performance, cost and regulatory compliance of cloud services. The results confirm that both algorithms are capable of generating high-quality Pareto-optimal solution sets and identify compromises between key selection criteria. It was shown that the NSGA-III algorithm provided a more even distribution of alternatives in the criteria space, which is important for supporting informed management decisions. The practical value of the work lies in the possibility of using the proposed model as a basis for decision support systems for the implementation of cloud technologies in higher education institutions.