Software Trustworthiness Evaluation Method based on Relationships Between Criteria

Software trustworthiness evaluation (STE) is regarded as a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem that consists of criteria. However, most of the current STE do not consider the relationships between criteria. This paper presents a software trustworthiness evaluation method based on the relationships between criteria. Firstly, the relationships between criteria is described by cooperative and conflicting degrees between criteria. Then, a measure formula for the substitutivity between criteria is proposed and the cooperative degree between criteria is taken as the approximation of the substitutivity between criteria. With the help of the substitutivity between criteria, the software trustworthiness measurement model obtained by axiomatic approaches is applied to aggregate the degree to which each optional software product meets each objective. Finally, the candidate software products are sorted according to the trustworthiness aggregation results, and the optimal product is obtained from the alternative software products on the basis of the sorting results. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through case study.