Elastic Component Characterization with Respect to Quality Properties: An Intuitionistic Fuzzy-Based Approach

Component selection based on quality properties is a fuzzy process because measurable component attributes cannot be attributed with certainty to high-level quality properties such as the ones proposed by the ISO/IEC 9126 quality model and other similar models. In addition, measurable component quality attributes can be characterized differently for different application domains (e.g., a total execution time value can be considered very satisfactory for one application domain and extremely unsatisfactory for another). In this paper we demonstrate the usage of an intuitionistic fuzzy approach in selecting components originating from an elastic component repository. Elastic components are the output of a quality-driven process for component development that results in component variants based on quality discrimination. During reuse, utilization of intuitionistic fuzzy sets can be proven an efficient solution to derive a first-level characterization of the available components, by considering not only the uncertainty of the reusers but also their hesitation degree.